Mr. Osborne replied to the Colonel's question with another.
"Lanyon, did Geoffrey Fleming pass you as you came in?"
"Geoffrey Fleming!" The Colonel wheeled round on his heels like a teetotum. He glanced behind him. "What the deuce do you mean, Frank? If I catch that thief under the roof which covers me, I'll make a case for the police of him."
Then Mr. Osborne remembered what, in his agitation, he had momentarily forgotten, that Geoffrey Fleming had had no bitterer, more out-spoken, and, it may be added, more well-merited an opponent than Colonel Lanyon in the Climax Club. The Colonel advanced towards Mr. Osborne.
"Do you know that that's the blackguard's chair you're standing by?"
"His chair!"
Mr. Osborne was leaning with one hand on the chair on which Mr. Fleming had, not long ago, been sitting.
"That's what he used to call it himself,--with his usual impudence. He used to sit in it whenever he took a hand. The men would give it up to him--you know how you gave everything up to him, all the lot of you. If he couldn't get it he'd turn nasty--wouldn't play. It seems that he had the cheek to cut his initials on the chair--I only heard of it the other day, or there'd have been a clearance of him long ago. Look here--what do you think of that for a piece of rowdiness?"
The Colonel turned the chair upside down. Sure enough in the woodwork underneath the seat were the letters, cut in good-sized characters--"G. F."
"You know that rubbishing way in which he used to talk. When men questioned his exclusive right to the chair, I've heard him say he'd prove his right by coming and sitting in it after he was dead and buried--he swore he'd haunt the chair. Idiot!--What is the matter with you Frank? You look as if you'd been in a rough and tumble--your necktie's all anyhow."