Then I remembered. Sam got into trouble with the police a few weeks ago. He and a dozen or so of his fellow-students broke loose and ran riot through the streets of Dublin. All high-spirited boys do this sort of thing occasionally, whether they are junior army officers, lawyers’ clerks, or university undergraduates. Trinity College boys, being Irish and having a large city at their gates, riot more picturesquely than anyone else. Sam had captured the flag which the Lord Mayor flies outside his house, had pushed a horse upstairs into the office of a respectable stockbroker, and had driven a motor-car, borrowed from an unwilling owner, down a narrow and congested street at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. He was captured in the end by eight policemen, and was very nearly sent to gaol with hard labour. I got him off by paying a fine of one pound, together with £2 4s. 6d. for the damage done by the horse to the stockbroker’s staircase and office furniture. The motorcar, fortunately, had neither injured itself nor anyone else.
“I hope,” I said, pocketing the money, “that this will be a lesson to you, Sam.”
“It won’t,” he said. “At least, not in the way you mean. It’ll encourage me to go into another rag the very first time I get the chance. As a matter of fact, being arrested was the luckiest thing ever happened to me, though I didn’t think so at the time.”
“Well,” I said, “if you like paying up these large sums it’s your own affair. I should have thought you could have got better value for your money by spending it on something you wanted.”
“Money isn’t everything in the world,” said Sam. “There is such a thing as having a good time, a rattling good time, even if you don’t make money out of it and run a chance of being arrested. I daresay you’d like to hear what I’ve been at.”
“If you’ve committed any kind of crime,” I said, “I’d rather you didn’t tell me. It might be awkward for me afterwards when you are tried.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly a crime,” said Sam, “anyhow, it isn’t anything wrong, though, of course, it may be slightly illegal. I’d rather like to have your opinion about that.”
“Is it a long story? I’m rather busy to-day.”
“Not very long,” said Sam, “but I daresay it would sound better after dinner. What would you say now to asking me to dine to-night at your club? We could go up to that library place afterwards. There’s never anybody there, and I could tell you the whole thing.”
Sam knows the ways of my club nearly as well as I do myself. There is never anyone in the library in the evening. I gave the required invitation.