There was no doubt that the man was dead.  Insensibility alone could never have produced this icy chill.  He raised his head in the darkness, and cried aloud to those approaching.  He meant to cry:  “Help!  Murder!” But fear prevented clear articulation.  What he shouted was:  “Heh!  Mer!” On which, from the neighborhood of the staircase, somebody began to fire a revolver.

The Earl of Emsworth had been sleeping a sound and peaceful sleep when the imbroglio began downstairs.  He sat up and listened.  Yes; undoubtedly burglars!  He switched on his light and jumped out of bed.  He took a pistol from a drawer, and thus armed went to look into the matter.  The dreamy peer was no poltroon.

It was quite dark when he arrived on the scene of conflict, in the van of a mixed bevy of pyjamaed and dressing-gowned relations.  He was in the van because, meeting these relations in the passage above, he had said to them:  “Let me go first.  I have a pistol.”  And they had let him go first.  They were, indeed, awfully nice about it, not thrusting themselves forward or jostling or anything, but behaving in a modest and self-effacing manner that was pretty to watch.

When Lord Emsworth said, “Let me go first,” young Algernon Wooster, who was on the very point of leaping to the fore, said, “Yes, by Jove!  Sound scheme, by Gad!”—­and withdrew into the background; and the Bishop of Godalming said:  “By all means, Clarence undoubtedly; most certainly precede us.”

When his sense of touch told him he had reached the foot of the stairs, Lord Emsworth paused.  The hall was very dark and the burglars seemed temporarily to have suspended activities.  And then one of them, a man with a ruffianly, grating voice, spoke.  What it was he said Lord Emsworth could not understand.  It sounded like “Heh!  Mer!”—­probably some secret signal to his confederates.  Lord Emsworth raised his revolver and emptied it in the direction of the sound.

Extremely fortunately for him, the Efficient Baxter had not changed his all-fours attitude.  This undoubtedly saved Lord Emsworth the worry of engaging a new secretary.  The shots sang above Baxter’s head one after the other, six in all, and found other billets than his person.  They disposed themselves as follows:  The first shot broke a window and whistled out into the night; the second shot hit the dinner gong and made a perfectly extraordinary noise, like the Last Trump; the third, fourth and fifth shots embedded themselves in the wall; the sixth and final shot hit a life-size picture of his lordship’s grandmother in the face and improved it out of all knowledge.

One thinks no worse of Lord Emsworth’s grandmother because she looked like Eddie Foy, and had allowed herself to be painted, after the heavy classic manner of some of the portraits of a hundred years ago, in the character of Venus—­suitably draped, of course, rising from the sea; but it was beyond the possibility of denial that her grandson’s bullet permanently removed one of Blandings Castle’s most prominent eyesores.