The Gold Bat

“There was one of Mrs Patrick Campbell,” Milton continued in heartrending tones, “which was torn into sixteen pieces. I counted them. There they are on the mantelpiece. And there was one of Little Tich” (here he almost broke down), “which was so covered with ink that for half an hour I couldn't recognise it. Fact.”

Trevor nodded sympathetically.

“Yes,” said Milton. “Soaked.”

There was another silence. Trevor felt it would be almost an outrage to discuss so prosaic a topic as the date of a house-match with one so broken up. Yet time was flying, and lock-up was drawing near.

“Are you willing to play—” he began.

“I feel as if I could never play again,” interrupted Milton. “You'd hardly believe the amount of blotting-paper I've used today. It must have been a lunatic, Dick, old man.”

When Milton called Trevor “Dick', it was a sign that he was moved. When he called him “Dick, old man', it gave evidence of an internal upheaval without parallel.

“Why, who else but a lunatic would get up in the night to wreck another chap's study? All this was done between eleven last night and seven this morning. I turned in at eleven, and when I came down here again at seven the place was a wreck. It must have been a lunatic.”

“How do you account for the printed card from the League?”

Milton murmured something about madmen's cunning and diverting suspicion, and relapsed into silence. Trevor seized the opportunity to make the proposal he had come to make, that Donaldson's v. Seymour's should be played on the following Wednesday.

Milton agreed listlessly.

“Just where you're standing,” he said, “I found a photo-graph of Sir Henry Irving so slashed about that I thought at first it was Huntley Wright in San Toy.”

“Start at two-thirty sharp,” said Trevor.

“I had seventeen of Edna May,” continued the stricken Seymourite, monotonously. “In various attitudes. All destroyed.”

“On the first fifteen ground, of course,” said Trevor. “I'll get Aldridge to referee. That'll suit you, I suppose?”

“All right. Anything you like. Just by the fireplace I found the remains of Arthur Roberts in H.M.S. Irresponsible. And part of Seymour Hicks. Under the table—”

Trevor departed.

XIV. THE WHITE FIGURE

“Suppose,” said Shoeblossom to Barry, as they were walking over to school on the morning following the day on which Milton's study had passed through the hands of the League, “suppose you thought somebody had done something, but you weren't quite certain who, but you knew it was some one, what would you do?”

“What on earth do you mean?” inquired Barry.

“I was trying to make an A.B. case of it,” explained Shoeblossom.

“What's an A.B. case?”

“I don't know,” admitted Shoeblossom, frankly. “But it comes in a book of Stevenson's. I think it must mean a sort of case where you call everyone A. and B. and don't tell their names.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“It's about Milton's study.”

“What! what about it?”

“Well, you see, the night it was ragged I was sitting in my study with a dark lantern—”

“What!”

Shoeblossom proceeded to relate the moving narrative of his night-walking adventure. He dwelt movingly on his state of mind when standing behind the door, waiting for Mr Seymour to come in and find him. He related with appropriate force the hair-raising episode of the weird white figure. And then he came to the conclusions he had since drawn (in calmer moments) from that apparition's movements.

“You see,” he said, “I saw it coming out of Milton's study, and that must have been about the time the study was ragged. And it went into Rigby's dorm. So it must have been a chap in that dorm, who did it.”

Shoeblossom was quite clever at rare intervals. Even Barry, whose belief in his sanity was of the smallest, was compelled to admit that here, at any rate, he was talking sense.

“What would you do?” asked Shoeblossom.

“Tell Milton, of course,” said Barry.

“But he'd give me beans for being out of the dorm, after lights-out.”

This was a distinct point to be considered. The attitude of Barry towards Milton was different from that of Shoeblossom. Barry regarded him—through having played with him in important matches—as a good sort of fellow who had always behaved decently to him. Leather-Twigg, on the other hand, looked on him with undisguised apprehension, as one in authority who would give him lines the first time he came into contact with him, and cane him if he ever did it again. He had a decided disinclination to see Milton on any pretext whatever.

“Suppose I tell him?” suggested Barry.

“You'll keep my name dark?” said Shoeblossom, alarmed.