“What idea?”
“Well, you know how many parsons there are round about here. There are about a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and each hamlet has a church and each church has a parson and each parson preaches a sermon every Sunday. To-morrow week—Sunday the twenty-third—we’re running off the great Sermon Handicap. Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins. Did you study the race-card I sent you?”
“I couldn’t understand what it was all about.”
“Why, you chump, it gives the handicaps and the current odds on each starter. I’ve got another one here, in case you’ve lost yours. Take a careful look at it. It gives you the thing in a nutshell. Jeeves, old son, do you want a sporting flutter?”
“Sir?” said Jeeves, who had just meandered in with my breakfast.
Claude explained the scheme. Amazing the way Jeeves grasped it right off. But he merely smiled in a paternal sort of way.
“Thank you, sir, I think not.”
“Well, you’re with us, Bertie, aren’t you?” said Claude, sneaking a roll and a slice of bacon. “Have you studied that card? Well, tell me, does anything strike you about it?”
Of course it did. It had struck me the moment I looked at it.
“Why, it’s a sitter for old Heppenstall,” I said. “He’s got the event sewed up in a parcel. There isn’t a parson in the land who could give him eight minutes. Your pal Steggles must be an ass, giving him a handicap like that. Why, in the days when I was with him, old Heppenstall never used to preach under half an hour, and there was one sermon of his on Brotherly Love which lasted forty-five minutes if it lasted a second. Has he lost his vim lately, or what is it?”