Looking down at the crowd, we had seen the head and shoulders of a powerful and strenuous man moving slowly forward, and leaving behind him a long V-shaped ripple upon its surface like the wake of a swimming dog.  Now, as he pushed his way through the looser fringe the head was raised, and there was the grinning, hardy face of the smith looking up at us.  He had left his hat in the ring, and was enveloped in an overcoat with a blue bird’s-eye handkerchief tied round his neck.  As he emerged from the throng he let his great-coat fly loose, and showed that he was dressed in his full fighting kit—­ black drawers, chocolate stockings, and white shoes.

“I’m right sorry to be so late, Sir Charles,” he cried.  “I’d have been sooner, but it took me a little time to make it all straight with the missus.  I couldn’t convince her all at once, an’ so I brought her with me, and we argued it out on the way.”

Looking at the gig, I saw that it was indeed Mrs. Harrison who was seated in it.  Sir Charles beckoned him up to the wheel of the curricle.

“What in the world brings you here, Harrison?” he whispered.  “I am as glad to see you as ever I was to see a man in my life, but I confess that I did not expect you.”

“Well, sir, you heard I was coming,” said the smith.

“Indeed, I did not.”

“Didn’t you get a message, Sir Charles, from a man named Cumming, landlord of the Friar’s Oak Inn?  Mister Rodney there would know him.”

“We saw him dead drunk at the George.”

“There, now, if I wasn’t afraid of it!” cried Harrison, angrily.  “He’s always like that when he’s excited, and I never saw a man more off his head than he was when he heard I was going to take this job over.  He brought a bag of sovereigns up with him to back me with.”

“That’s how the betting got turned,” said my uncle.  “He found others to follow his lead, it appears.”

“I was so afraid that he might get upon the drink that I made him promise to go straight to you, sir, the very instant he should arrive.  He had a note to deliver.”

“I understand that he reached the George at six, whilst I did not return from Reigate until after seven, by which time I have no doubt that he had drunk his message to me out of his head.  But where is your nephew Jim, and how did you come to know that you would be needed?”

“It is not his fault, I promise you, that you should be left in the lurch.  As to me, I had my orders to take his place from the only man upon earth whose word I have never disobeyed.”

“Yes, Sir Charles,” said Mrs. Harrison, who had left the gig and approached us.  “You can make the most of it this time, for never again shall you have my Jack—­not if you were to go on your knees for him.”

“She’s not a patron of sport, and that’s a fact,” said the smith.

“Sport!” she cried, with shrill contempt and anger.  “Tell me when all is over.”