"I was in a passion," Bennet declared, "and did not know what I was doing. I never thought of killing him."
"Then why did you say to him—I heard the words distinctly—'I'll kill you'?"
But Bennet made no reply. He now comprehended fully the position in which he stood, and he thought silence his best policy. Those about him, however, were far from silent. He could not help hearing what was being said, and he understood that nothing but detestation and execration were being expressed. The crowd had no sympathy whatever for him. On the contrary, had the crowd not been composed of Englishmen, accustomed to abide by the law of the land, Bennet would have been given a short shrift. If what he had done had been perpetrated in America, he would undoubtedly have been immediately lynched out of hand. But the crowd waited for the police to come upon the scene.
The crowd, however, talked excitedly, vehemently. The words which had passed between Bennet and the jockey were repeated from lip to lip. The statement of Bob Deans that Bennet had tried to bribe him to pull Go Nap, and that he had refused to do so, was soon known to all; in the minds of most was the thought that Bennet, in suggesting this course to the jockey, was guilty of a crime even greater perhaps than murder, and that no punishment was too heavy for it. Many of them would have maintained that hanging was too good for him; some of them even said so.
Presently the police came up, and Bennet was arrested and charged with the murder of Bob Deans.
The affair, as was to be expected, made a tremendous sensation, not only throughout the world of the turf, but everywhere.
At Doncaster itself reports of what had taken place spread like wildfire through the place; nothing else was talked of, and but little interest was taken in the remaining races on the programme that afternoon.
In the whole history of racing never had there been anything so extraordinary.
The popular victory of Go Nap, the murder of the victorious jockey by the owner of the horse, the revelation which had been given by the unfortunate Deans of the reason why Bennet had killed him,—these and other particulars, which grew and grew as they passed from mouth to mouth, formed as sensational a set of incidents as could well be imagined. Brief but lurid accounts of what had occurred at Doncaster appeared in the London evening papers the same day, and caused the greatest excitement.
Gilbert Eversleigh, walking about seven o'clock from the Temple to his club for dinner, his mind occupied and distressed by the difficult problem of how his father was to escape ruin, received his first intimation of the tragedy from the placard of one of these journals. In large, solid black letters he read—