The stables gave me what I wanted, and coming back with it through a dark passage, I ran squarely into Ipps. ‘Go on!’ he grunted. ‘The minute he lays hands on Master Bobby, Master Bobby’s saved. But that person ought to be told how near he came to being assaulted. It was touch-and-go with me all the time from the soup down, I assure you.’

I arrived breathless with the sacks and the ropes. ‘They were two to one with me,’ said Mr. Wontner, as he took them. ‘If they wake—’

‘We’ll stand by,’ Stalky replied. ‘Two to one is quite fair.’

But the boys hardly grunted as Mr. Wontner roped first one and then the other. Even when they were slid into the sacks they only mumbled, with rolling heads, through sticky lips, and snored on.

‘Port?’ said Mr. Wontner virtuously.

‘Nervous exhaustion. They aren’t much more than kids, after all. What’s next?’ said Stalky.

‘I want to take ’em away with me, please.’

Stalky looked at him with respect.

‘I’ll have my car round in five minutes,’ said The Infant. ‘Ipps’ll help carry ’em downstairs,’ and he shook Mr. Wontner by the hand.

We were all perfectly serious till the two bundles were dumped on a divan in the hall, and the boys waked and began to realise what had happened.

‘Yah!’ said Mr. Wontner, with the simplicity of twelve years old. ‘Who’s scored now?’ And he sat upon them. The tension broke in a storm of laughter, led, I think, by Ipps.

‘Asinine—absolutely asinine!’ said Mr. Wontner, with folded arms from his lively chair. But he drank in the flattery and the fellowship of it all with quite a brainless grin, as we rolled and stamped round him, and wiped the tears from our cheeks.

‘Hang it!’ said Bobby Trivett. ‘We’re defeated!’

‘By tactics, too,’ said Eames. ‘I didn’t think you knew ’em, Clausewitz. It’s a fair score. What are you going to do with us?’

‘Take you back to Mess,’ said Mr. Wontner.

‘Not like this?’

‘Oh no. Worse—much worse! I haven’t begun with you yet. And you thought you’d scored! Yah!’

They had scored beyond their wildest dream. The man in whose hands it lay to shame them, their Colonel, their Adjutant, their Regiment, and their Service, had cast away all shadow of his legal rights for the sake of a common or bear-garden rag—such a rag as if it came to the ears of the authorities, would cost him his commission. They were saved, and their saviour was their equal and their brother. So they chaffed and reviled him as such till he again squashed the breath out of them, and we others laughed louder than they.

‘Fall in!’ said Stalky when the limousine came round. ‘This is the score of the century.