Chris Kennedy’s weight and enthusiasm brought the fight to an abrupt finish.
Mr Campion picked himself up from the corner where he had been last hurled. He was half strangled, but still laughing idiotically. Meanwhile, Chris Kennedy inspected the butler, whose stream of rhetoric had become much louder but less coherent.
‘The fellow’s roaring tight,’ he announced, upon closer inspection. ‘Absolutely fighting-canned, but it’s wearing off a bit now.’
He pushed the man away from him contemptuously, and the erstwhile warrior reeled against the stair-head and staggered off down out of sight.
‘What’s happened? What’s the trouble?’ Wyatt Petrie came hurrying up the passage, his voice anxious and slightly annoyed.
Everybody looked at Mr Campion. He was leaning up against the balustrade, his fair hair hanging over his eyes, and for the first time it dawned upon Abbershaw that he was fully dressed, and not, as might have been expected, in the dinner-jacket he had worn on the previous evening.
His explanation was characteristic.
‘Most extraordinary,’ he said, in his slightly high-pitched voice. ‘The fellow set on me. Picked me up and started doing exercises with me as if I were a dumb-bell. I thought it was one of you fellows joking at first, but when he began to jump on me it percolated through that I was being massacred. Butchered to make a butler’s beano, in fact.’
He paused and smiled fatuously.
‘I began to hit back then,’ he continued. ‘The bird was tight, of course, but I’m glad you fellows turned up. I didn’t like the idea of him chipping bits off the ancestral home with me.’