After tiffin we went down into the valley to meet the emissary of a
Certain Mighty Person and Number One. The emissary advanced with a
scroll so illegible that Jacobs bent over it in despair. Taking
advantage of his absorption, the villain put his hand upon my friend's
shoulder. I sprang upon him like a bull-dog.
Meanwhile Lamb Ral created a pleasant diversion by drawing down from
the sky a blood-curdling fog, heavier than the after-dinner speech of
an alderman, more dense than the public taste, more paralyzing than
the philosophy of the last popular novel. Dread and cottony, like a
curtain, descended the awful cloud into the uplifted arms of the
sleight-of-hand man, until I could not see an inch before my nose.
Nevertheless I was able to observe that he had stretched himself,
probably by an arrangement of crossed levers, to an incalculable
height, and I distinctly observed him wink with one eye as I kneaded
my adversary.
As I had just snapped the arm of the emissary like a pipe-stem and the
rest had each killed somebody, the mist was opportune and our party
skulked back to camp, where we all drank a good deal of tiffin. The
result of our imbibing was that Jacobs clapped Number One on the
shoulder.
"You're a bully good fellow," he observed, thickly. "Git!"
Lamb Ral and Number One disappeared in a red light, with plaintive
music from the orchestra.