I phoned back to Pook's Hill and was rewarded by catching Jimmie five minutes before the taxi was due to pick her up.
"Hold everything, dear," I told her. "Plans have changed. I'm coming out on the first train I can catch. How's Ponto?"
"Thank Heaven you called," Winnie's wife replied. "I couldn't find your dressing gown and your traveling case is in the room with Ponto and I didn't want to disturb him.... Oh he's snoring like mad. Passed out cold, I guess. He shakes the house. I never knew dogs got drunk, did you?"
When I first arrived at Pook's Hill I had a definite program in mind. First, I went to the kitchen, broke a raw egg into a tumbler and soused it in Worchester sauce. Then I added a good slug of brandy from the portable bar in my den. Armed with this Prairie Oyster, I went boldly to the second floor, opened the door to my bedroom and contemplated the debauched Great Dane.
Really, I could never have believed that a dog could look so completely blotto. Ponto was a bum in every sense of the word. He lay drooling and snoring on the bed, dead to the world.
"Ponto!" I ordered.
An ear pricked up, then dropped languidly back again. Then a blood-shot eye opened and shut. There was a half-whine, half snarl, interrupted by a violent hiccough.
"Here you are, Ponto!" I stated firmly, advancing on the bed, glass in hand.
The blood-shot eye opened again and the beast began to shake and shiver. I walked up, lifted his jowl in one hand, made a little funnel of his lip and poured in the Prairie Oyster. Then I clamped a firm control on the jaws, held Ponto's head back and let it slide gulping down his gullet.