“I say, Blazes, how’s the Monarch? Flown away, Bags says. Dirty vermin anyhow, so what’s the odds? Come and practise at No. 1 net at half-past twelve with me and Ferrers.”

David chucked his sponge into his bath and kicked off his slippers.

“Can’t. Catechism to learn, thanks to Stone.”

“Oh, yes, so you have. I expect you wouldn’t be able to hold a bat either. Never mind, buck up. All the same in a hundred years. Besides, Hughes was caned two mornings running last year, and he didn’t blub even at the second helping.”

The goat-like Bags entered at this moment.

“I say, rough luck,” he said to David. “I warned you as soon as I saw Glanders. Found the Monarch yet?”

This was rather too much. David felt suddenly sure that Bags was at the bottom of all his misfortunes, and, already goaded by high-spirited sympathy, turned on him.

“No, I haven’t,” he shouted; “and I’m jolly well going to search your cubicle. I believe you stole him. Look here, you chaps, I believe Bags took the Monarch, and I believe he saw Glanders coming when I was talking to him, and didn’t warn me.”

Stone took his brown head out of the towel in which he had been rubbing it.

“Why? What evidence?” he asked.

“Unless you’re too blooming omniscient to want evidence,” said Bags.

“Because you’re a sneak. Because I jolly well hurt you last night, and you said I hadn’t to put me off the scent,” said David with a sudden inspiration. “Why, you’ve got a bruise as big as a football,” he cried, pointing to the injured part of Bags’s anatomy, “and yet you said it didn’t hurt. It must have hurt: it’s all rot to say it didn’t. And you said it was pax in order to put me off the look-out.”

“Bosh: that’s not evidence,” said Ferrers, whose father was a K.C., and was much looked up to on points of school-law. “That’s only your blooming guess.”

“Well, it would be evidence if I found the Monarch in his beastly cubicle,” said David. “Or perhaps you’d say that stags can fly, and that the Monarch had only flown there.”

This was sarcasm of the deepest dye, and produced its due effect on all the boys who, in various stages of undress, surrounded the two, except Stone, who never could understand what sarcasm meant.

“Oh rot, Blazes,” said he. “At that rate the Monarch may have flown to my cubicle, but I’m not going to have you search it and turn everything upside down for the sake of a sickly stag-beetle.”

The man of law considered the points.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t make a challenge out of it, Blazes,” he said, disregarding the obtuse Stone. “If you’re so certain of it, you can challenge Bags to allow you to search his cubicle, an’ if you don’t find the Monarch there, he gives you three cuts of the hardest with a racquet-handle and pax immediately afterwards.”

David was standing in his bath, and, slipping, plumped down into it heaving out solid water.

“Sorry, you fellows,” he said to those who were wettest. “Right then, I challenge.”

Bags had moved away, in the general stampede caused by David’s plunge, and on the instant, with fresh suspicions teeming in his head, David jumped out, and got between him and the door of the big bath-room.

“I say, Bags, you haven’t had your bath,” he said; “and were you going back without it? Aren’t you going to have a bath? Not feeling dirty? Anyhow, I challenge. Do you accept it?”

Bags took off his dressing-gown.

“Oh, you thought I was going back to dormitory to put them in your cubicle again, did you?” he said. “It just happens to be my bath there by the door.”

“Well, but do you accept?” cried David, executing a sort of Indian war-dance round him.

“No,” said Bags. “I don’t want to give you three with a racquet-handle, as we made it up last night. And I don’t want you turning everything upside down in my cubicle.”

Ferrers put on his dressing-gown with the solemnity of a judge assuming the black-cap.

“Then it simply proves the plaintiff’s case, if you won’t have your cubicle searched,” he said. “It’s all rot about your not wanting to whack Blazes because it was pax last night. He’s challenged you: it isn’t pax any longer. State of war!”

Ferrers was in his element, and it seemed to the court generally even as to him, that never at the Old Bailey had the net been woven in such impenetrable fashion round the most palpable criminal. Bags, too, felt that, but the net that really enmeshed him was of very different sort from what it appeared to be. Certainly he was in a hole, but not the hole that every one thought he was in.

The majesty of the law proceeded.

“If you don’t accept the challenge,” said Ferrers, “it proves you are guilty.”

The plaintiff continued to dance.

“I’ll let you give me six cuts, if I don’t find the Monarch in your cubicle,” he shouted. “You must be guilty, if you refuse six. Mustn’t he, Ferrers?”

Ferrers tore his sock in trying to put it on to a wet foot.

“Not for a cert,” he said. “Bags is beastly cunning. He may be running you up to a higher figure.”

“Then I’ll let him have twelve cuts,” said David, feeling absolutely sure about it, “if I may search his cubicle and not find the Monarch. Oh, and search his dressing-gown, too,” he added quickly, conjecturing a perfectly demoniacal piece of cunning on the part of Bags.

Bags stepped out of his bath with dignity, feeling there was no escape.

“Then I accept Blazes’ challenge of three cuts,” he said, “just to show I didn’t want to run him up. If I did, I should take twelve.”

“Done,” said David. “I’ll go and search at once; there’s another quarter of an hour before school. I may as well search his dressing-gown first. No, not there. Oh, blow! what shall I say if Glanders finds me in his cubicle again? I know: Bags is in the bath-room, and wants his liniment. If Glanders doesn’t think that likely, she can come and look at him.”

Now Bags’s dilemma, the net in which he was really involved, was this. He had lain awake for two hours last night in savage anger with David, whom, in secret boyish fashion, he adored, and who had been so beastly to him. Open vengeance was out of the question, because, if it came to a fight, David was more than his match, and thus his revenge for that infernal kick must be done stealthily. Plan after plan suggested itself to him, but none were suitable until he thought of the very simple one of taking the Monarch and his wife, which, as he knew quite well, lived in David’s washing-basin at night. That was accomplished very easily, without disturbing their owner. But a few hours later he was awakened by David himself, who had conceived the revolting suspicion that Bags had done precisely what he had done. Then at the same moment almost, while he was hot with indignation at being justly accused, he had seen the matron at the far end of the dormitory, and could not resist the temptation to get David into further trouble. This, too, had been successfully accomplished, and David would certainly be caned after morning school. And then Bags began to regret his success: his affection for David, whom no one could help liking even when he was being beastly, and his sense of his own meanness pointed the finger of scorn at him, and, having ensured David a caning, he wished he had not, at any rate, taken his beloved stag-beetles as well. So, lingering behind till the rest of the dormitory had gone to the bath-room, he induced the Monarch and his wife, who were scratching about in his soap-tin, to crawl on to his sponge, and, as he passed David’s cubicle, he had shaken them off on to his bed.

Then had come the bath-room complication. He had been forced eventually by Ferrers’s resistless legal acumen to accept the challenge, and he would have to whack David, for any one might search his cubicle till Doomsday and never find a stag-beetle there. And each one of those cuts would be unjust: he had taken the stag-beetles, and David was perfectly right. The fact of having put them back did not ease a troubled conscience.

David rushed upstairs again to his dormitory, and with clatter and publicity went straight to Bags’s cubicle, and began a violent and intimate search. He searched in his pockets, he examined the lower tray of his soap-dish, he peered behind pictures, and ransacked the receptacle, usually called the synagogue-box, where Bags kept family-letters and such-like, but nowhere was there the faintest trace of the Monarch to be seen. These operations Glanders observed – and David observed that she was observing them – with her bleak and stony eyes, and just as he was very busy she approached.

“Do you want to be reported twice, Master Blaize?” she asked.

“Oh, certainly, if you like,” said David. “But Crabtree asked me to get his liniment.”

“And why can’t Master Crabtree get it himself, then?” asked Glanders. “And why does he want liniment?”

“Oh, don’t be tedious,” said David. “He can’t get it himself, because he hasn’t got any clothes on, and is afraid of shocking you, and he wants it because he has got a bruise, which you can see if you aren’t afraid of being shocked. Anything else I can tell you?”

Muffled laughter sounded from various directions as Glanders sniffed, which was her congenital way of acknowledging the legality of doubtful proceedings, and David finished his search, turning over the pillows of Bags’s bed without further hindrance. But there was no Monarch to be found, and he had to go back to the bath-room to report that he could find no liniment and had lost his challenge. This was depressing, because the beloved Monarch was still missing, also his wife, the hope of the race, and because the loss of the challenge meant three nasty cuts from Bags and his racquet-handle. And the Head was going to let fly at him first, and there was the missionary-map to be made, and the whole blackness of this dreadful Monday morning, dissipated for the moment by his certainty that he would find the Monarch, overcast the sky again.

On his way back he passed his cubicle, and, pausing to throw his sponge and towel down, his eye fell on his bed, and there on the blanket were two black blots of familiar shape.

David gave a great sigh.

“Oh Monarch and missus,” he said affectionately, “you little devils.”

The travelling-carriage of the royalties was to hand, and in a moment the black pair were safe again. How they had got on to his blanket he did not pause to think, and the three cuts due to him were “jolly cheap at the price.” He made but a couple of leaps down the stairs to the bath-room.

“I say, I’ve lost the challenge, Bags,” he said; “but I’ve found the Monarch. He was on my blankets, and so was she. And – I say, I’m sorry I suspected you. When’ll you take your cuts?”

Bags’s inconvenient conscience and affection gave him a nasty prod at this. If David had only not said he was sorry he suspected him, he would not have felt so “beastly.” On the other hand, it was dangerous to try to stifle his internal beastliness by magnanimity, since this might lead to fresh suspicions on David’s part. But magnanimity salted with sarcasm might serve his turn.

“Oh, I don’t want to whack you,” he said, “as you say you were sorry. As if I should have touched your filthy stags! Clip their wings, and take them to Marchester next half, and see if Hughes is proud of his pal who keeps vermin.”

David stared in blank surprise. To forgo the pleasure of chastisement was not in the spirit of Shylock.

“Oh, well, thanks awfully,” he said. “If you don’t want to take your cuts, I’m sure I don’t mind not getting them. But why don’t you?”

Bags was struggling into his shirt, and speech was for the moment extinguished.

“Simply because the challenge was too silly for words,” he said, as his head emerged.

The repetition of this silly reason did exactly that which Bags desired should not happen. Suspicion, vague and unformulated as yet, again sprang up in David’s mind. Such magnanimity was simply childish.

“I think I’ll take the cuts then, Crabtree,” he said, to mark the complete severance of friendly relations.

That roused Bags: the rejection of his spurious, but highly superior, motives quite stifled the prods of his inconvenient conscience.

“All right, then, you shall,” he said. “Gosh! I’ll let into you. I’ll put beef into them, Blaize. I’ve got a racquet-handle that’ll do nicely. I bet I break it. You’ll want some liniment afterwards.”

The ten-minutes bell sounded at this moment, and the boys ran upstairs again to finish dressing and say their prayers. For the last five minutes of these ten they were bound to be on their knees at their bedside, while Glanders patrolled the dormitory. But with care and discreet peeping through fingers it was possible to get through some neglected dressing during the devotional five minutes, and David, who was a good deal behindhand, buttoned his collar, put on his tie, and laced one boot without being detected.

Mr. Dutton was in an unusually docile mood during this hour from seven to eight, and it wanted little penetration on the part of his pupils, when they remembered the visit he had done the Head the honour to pay him last night, to guess the cause of that. David felt chagrin at the fact that he had been detained in the bath-room, and had not been able to take the dismembered yellow-back from the grate, to find out what made the Head so waxy, but there was no doubt that it was the Head who had made Mr. Dutton so mild. Indeed, it had often been a debated question as to which was really the worst, a caning or a proper “jaw” from the Head, for the hardiest were reduced to unwilling tears by the Head’s tongue, when he really chose to apply it, so convincing and dismal a picture could he paint of a boy’s satanic iniquity, and the inevitable ruin that such courses fashioned for him in this world and the next. But it was a point of honour not to cry at any application of the cane after you were twelve; kids might cry, but not elderly persons. The cane might break your hands, and make you set your teeth, but it was not allowable to let it break your spirit. But a “jaw” broke your spirit into smithereens, and no doubt that disintegrating process had happened to old Dubs. Anything in the way of construing was sufficient this morning, and the grammatical questions were mere child’s-play.