Robinson had been a petrified spectator of the Captain-Kettle-like manoeuvres of the cricket captain, and it did not take him long to make up his mind.  He was not altogether a coward.  In different circumstances he might have put up a respectable show.  But it takes a more than ordinarily courageous person to embark on a fight which he knows must end in his destruction.  Robinson knew that he was nothing like a match even for Stone, and Adair had disposed of Stone in a little over one minute.  It seemed to Robinson that neither pleasure nor profit was likely to come from an encounter with Adair.

“All right,” he said hastily, “I’ll turn up.”

“Good,” said Adair.  “I wonder if either of you chaps could tell me which is Jackson’s study.”

Stone was dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief, a task which precluded anything in the shape of conversation; so Robinson replied that Mike’s study was the first you came to on the right of the corridor at the top of the stairs.

“Thanks,” said Adair.  “You don’t happen to know if he’s in, I suppose?”

“He went up with Smith a quarter of an hour ago.  I don’t know if he’s still there.”

“I’ll go and see,” said Adair.  “I should like a word with him if he isn’t busy.”

CHAPTER LIV 

ADAIR HAS A WORD WITH MIKE

Mike, all unconscious of the stirring proceedings which had been going on below stairs, was peacefully reading a letter he had received that morning from Strachan at Wrykyn, in which the successor to the cricket captaincy which should have been Mike’s had a good deal to say in a lugubrious strain.  In Mike’s absence things had been going badly with Wrykyn.  A broken arm, contracted in the course of some rash experiments with a day-boy’s motor-bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of Dunstable, the only man who had shown any signs of being able to bowl a side out.  Since this calamity, wrote Strachan, everything had gone wrong.  The M.C.C., led by Mike’s brother Reggie, the least of the three first-class-cricketing Jacksons, had smashed them by a hundred and fifty runs.  Geddington had wiped them off the face of the earth.  The Incogs, with a team recruited exclusively from the rabbit-hutch—­not a well-known man on the side except Stacey, a veteran who had been playing for the club since Fuller Pilch’s time—­had got home by two wickets.  In fact, it was Strachan’s opinion that the Wrykyn team that summer was about the most hopeless gang of dead-beats that had ever made an exhibition of itself on the school grounds.  The Ripton match, fortunately, was off, owing to an outbreak of mumps at that shrine of learning and athletics—­the second outbreak of the malady in two terms.  Which, said Strachan, was hard lines on Ripton, but a bit of jolly good luck for Wrykyn, as it had saved them from what would probably have been a record hammering, Ripton having eight of their last year’s team left, including Dixon, the fast bowler, against whom Mike alone of the Wrykyn team had been able to make runs in the previous season.  Altogether, Wrykyn had struck a bad patch.

Mike mourned over his suffering school.  If only he could have been there to help.  It might have made all the difference.  In school cricket one good batsman, to go in first and knock the bowlers off their length, may take a weak team triumphantly through a season.  In school cricket the importance of a good start for the first wicket is incalculable.

As he put Strachan’s letter away in his pocket, all his old bitterness against Sedleigh, which had been ebbing during the past few days, returned with a rush.  He was conscious once more of that feeling of personal injury which had made him hate his new school on the first day of term.

And it was at this point, when his resentment was at its height, that Adair, the concrete representative of everything Sedleighan, entered the room.

There are moments in life’s placid course when there has got to be the biggest kind of row.  This was one of them.

Psmith, who was leaning against the mantelpiece, reading the serial story in a daily paper which he had abstracted from the senior day-room, made the intruder free of the study with a dignified wave of the hand, and went on reading.  Mike remained in the deck-chair in which he was sitting, and contented himself with glaring at the newcomer.

Psmith was the first to speak.

“If you ask my candid opinion,” he said, looking up from his paper, “I should say that young Lord Antony Trefusis was in the soup already.  I seem to see the consommé splashing about his ankles.  He’s had a note telling him to be under the oak-tree in the Park at midnight.  He’s just off there at the end of this instalment.  I bet Long Jack, the poacher, is waiting there with a sandbag.  Care to see the paper, Comrade Adair?  Or don’t you take any interest in contemporary literature?”

“Thanks,” said Adair.  “I just wanted to speak to Jackson for a minute.”