‘Well, there’s the whole outfit for you—­exceptin’ my Lord Marshalton, ne Mankeltow, an’ me.  All active murderers—­specially the Law Lord—­or accessories after the fact.  And what do they hand you out for that, in this country?’

‘Twenty years, I believe,’ was my reply.

He reflected a moment.

‘No-o-o,’ he said, and followed it with a smoke-ring.  ’Twenty months at the Cape is my limit.  Say, murder ain’t the soul-shatterin’ event those nature-fakers in the magazines make out.  It develops naturally like any other proposition....  Say, ’j’ever play this golf game?  It’s come up in the States from Maine to California, an’ we’re prodoocin’ all the champions in sight.  Not a business man’s play, but interestin’.  I’ve got a golf-links in the park here that they tell me is the finest inland course ever.  I had to pay extra for that when I hired the ranche—­last year.  It was just before I signed the papers that our murder eventuated.  My Lord Marshalton he asked me down for the week-end to fix up something or other—­about Peters and the linen, I think ’twas.  Mrs. Zigler took a holt of the proposition.  She understood Peters from the word “go.”  There wasn’t any house-party; only fifteen or twenty folk.  A full house is thirty-two, Tommy tells me.  ’Guess we must be near on that to-night.  In the smoking-room here, my Lord Marshalton—­Mankeltow that was—­introduces me to this Walen man with the nose.  He’d been in the War too, from start to finish.  He knew all the columns and generals that I’d battled with in the days of my Zigler gun.  We kinder fell into each other’s arms an’ let the harsh world go by for a while.

’Walen he introduces me to your Lord Lundie. He was a new proposition to me.  If he hadn’t been a lawyer he’d have made a lovely cattle-king.  I thought I had played poker some.  Another of my breaks.  Ya-as!  It cost me eleven hundred dollars besides what Tommy said when I retired.  I have no fault to find with your hereditary aristocracy, or your judiciary, or your press.

‘Sunday we all went to Church across the Park here....  Psha!  Think o’ your rememberin’ my religion!  I’ve become an Episcopalian since I married.  Ya-as....  After lunch Walen did his crowned-heads-of-Europe stunt in the smokin’-room here.  He was long on Kings.  And Continental crises.  I do not pretend to follow British domestic politics, but in the aeroplane business a man has to know something of international possibilities.  At present, you British are settin’ in kimonoes on dynamite kegs.  Walen’s talk put me wise on the location and size of some of the kegs.  Ya-as!

‘After that, we four went out to look at those golf-links I was hirin’.  We each took a club.  Mine’—­he glanced at a great tan bag by the fire-place—­’was the beginner’s friend—­the cleek.  Well, sir, this golf proposition took a holt of me as quick as—­quick as death.  They had to prise me off the greens when it got too dark to