went out again, whereupon one of the girls exclaimed, “Goodness! I thought it must be Jonah sneaking in! The divers say he often creeps in here to study form!” She ended with a giggle.
One of the boys said, “Jonah would have a job to sneak in here today. And you keep your little trap shut, darling.”
“Oh! Oh, yes.” She giggled again. “I forgot the whale’s belly.”
“Less of it.” The boy jerked his head towards Hamish. “It’s not only walls that have ears.”
Hamish affected to take no notice. He felt that he had picked up a clue, but also that it would be of no use to probe too deeply into the girl’s disclosure, although she had made it clear that his students knew where Jones was, and probably had put him there.
“Well, come on,” said Hamish crisply. “Two lengths each, medley teams, remembering what I’ve told you about the turns and the take-over. Get in, back-strokes. Bunch up more, Phyllis. You want to try for the devil of a shove-off at the start. Get into your stroke as your head is coming up. That right arm should be out of the water as you surface, ready to pull. And you, Ken,
“Sure you don’t mean a whale, Jimmy?” said the boy, grinning. So, wherever Jones was, it seemed unlikely that the students intended his incarceration to be anything but a rag, deduced Hamish.
“On your marks,” he said. The medley relay teams consisted of four swimmers each. It was the custom, since, on the whole, the men were faster than the girls, for Hamish to mix the teams. The back-stroke swimmers had to be a man and a girl respectively, but a man took over from the girl on the butterfly leg, a girl from him on the breast-stroke, and a man completed the team by swimming the last two lengths on free-style. The other team followed the same plan, but in reverse.
Hamish was accustomed to pace the teams himself by swimming the eight lengths on free-style, and did so on this occasion. The exercise kept him in trim and spurred on the teams, who were determined some day to beat him.
When the training session was over, Hamish went straight to Henry, who was entertaining Rixie, Richard and a couple of girl discus-throwers to tea.
“Sit down, Jimmy, and have a cuppa. Plenty in the pot,” said Henry cordially.
“Oh, I didn’t come to gate-crash your tea-party,” said Hamish. “Just official business. It will keep.”
“Somebody been throwing out hints about Jonah?” asked Richard. “Is that the official business?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, in a vague sort of way.”
“There’s an arrangement for feeding rattlesnakes,” said Rixie. “I can tell you that much, if you want to know.”
“It was the mention of whales which intrigued me,” Hamish explained. “Is there any chance of history repeating itself? Is it arranged for Jonah to be spewed up before he perishes?”
The students remained silent.
“It isn’t their pigeon,” said Henry. “They have explained to me that they are not listed among the storm-tossed mariners who threw Jonah overboard, and therefore are loth to muscle in on somebody else’s casting of lots. Have another piece of cake, Dick, old son.”
“Thanks,” said Richard, cutting himself a generous slice. “Fact is, we can’t very well interfere, but we think the thing has gone far enough. The bloody so-and-so has been put away since early on Wednesday afternoon and now it’s Thursday tea-time.
“He’s somewhere on the premises, then?”
“Can’t tell you any more. There’s a syndicate involved. We don’t want to be roughed up by a pack of rude boys. I don’t mind two or three, but I don’t care for the idea of four of them sitting on me while two more get to work on my features with a razor-blade,” said Richard.
“Same goes for me,” said Rixie, “so—enough said. It’s up to the beaks now. We’ve tipped Henry off. We can’t do more.”
“There appears to be a vestige of human feeling about you blokes, after all,” said Hamish. “Are our features likely to be similarly decorated if we turn the place upside-down to look for the egregious Mr. Jones?”
“Couldn’t say. Thanks for the tea, Harry boy. No leakage of how you came by your information, eh?” said Rixie.
“So far as I’m concerned, I have received no information. I shall announce at dinner tonight that there will be no gym for the men until Mr. Jones decides to return to his duties, then I shall lock the gym doors against unauthorized entry and suggest the gym blokes take to other activities, that’s all,” Henry promised him.
“Does ‘the whale’s belly’ give you any ideas?” asked Hamish, when the students had gone.
“Not a sausage. I fancy it was the girls who nagged those two huskies into saying as much as they did.”
“Yes, that might be so,” said Hamish, “although I wouldn’t have thought the girls had that much influence in what Damon Runyon would call this ‘man’s town’.”
“Scarcity value,” said Henry. “Eighteen of them as against eighty-two of the grosser sex, you know.”
“Granted. All the same, doesn’t it strike you that there are two rather rummy aspects to all this?”
“Students are bound to break out occasionally.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then how do you mean?”
“Oh, well, I told you, when first we met, that I had a suspicious mind, but look at what
