“Well, it is all in the main line of my business.  I am a journalist on the Gazette.”

“Of course—­you said so when you took it on.  By the way, I’ve got a small job for you, if you’ll help me.”

“With pleasure.”

“Don’t mind takin’ a risk, do you?”

“What is the risk?”

“Well, it’s Ballinger—­he’s the risk.  You’ve heard of him?”

“No.”

“Why, young fellah, where have you lived?  Sir John Ballinger is the best gentleman jock in the north country.  I could hold him on the flat at my best, but over jumps he’s my master.  Well, it’s an open secret that when he’s out of trainin’ he drinks hard—­strikin’ an average, he calls it.  He got delirium on Toosday, and has been ragin’ like a devil ever since.  His room is above this.  The doctors say that it is all up with the old dear unless some food is got into him, but as he lies in bed with a revolver on his coverlet, and swears he will put six of the best through anyone that comes near him, there’s been a bit of a strike among the serving-men.  He’s a hard nail, is Jack, and a dead shot, too, but you can’t leave a Grand National winner to die like that—­what?”

“What do you mean to do, then?” I asked.

“Well, my idea was that you and I could rush him.  He may be dozin’, and at the worst he can only wing one of us, and the other should have him.  If we can get his bolster-cover round his arms and then ’phone up a stomach-pump, we’ll give the old dear the supper of his life.”

It was a rather desperate business to come suddenly into one’s day’s work.  I don’t think that I am a particularly brave man.  I have an Irish imagination which makes the unknown and the untried more terrible than they are.  On the other hand, I was brought up with a horror of cowardice and with a terror of such a stigma.  I dare say that I could throw myself over a precipice, like the Hun in the history books, if my courage to do it were questioned, and yet it would surely be pride and fear, rather than courage, which would be my inspiration.  Therefore, although every nerve in my body shrank from the whisky-maddened figure which I pictured in the room above, I still answered, in as careless a voice as I could command, that I was ready to go.  Some further remark of Lord Roxton’s about the danger only made me irritable.

“Talking won’t make it any better,” said I.  “Come on.”

I rose from my chair and he from his.  Then with a little confidential chuckle of laughter, he patted me two or three times on the chest, finally pushing me back into my chair.

“All right, sonny my lad—­you’ll do,” said he.  I looked up in surprise.