acted in the course of some rash experiments
with a day boy's motor bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of
Dunstable, the only man who had shown any signs of being able to bowl a
side out. Since this calamity, wrote Strachan, everything had gone
wrong. The M.C.C., led by Mike's brother Reggie, the least of the three
first-class cricketing Jacksons, had smashed them by a hundred and fifty
runs. Geddington had wiped them off the face of the earth. The Incogs,
with a team recruited exclusively from the rabbit hutch--not a
well-known man on the side except Stacey, a veteran who had been playing
for the club for nearly half a century--had got home by two wickets. In
fact, it was Strachan's opinion that the Wrykyn team that summer was
about the most hopeless gang of deadbeats that had ever made exhibition
of itself on the school grounds. The Ripton match, fortunately, was off,
owing to an outbreak of mumps at that shrine of learning and
athletics--the second outbreak of the malady in two terms. Which, said
Strachan, was hard lines on Ripton, but a bit of jolly good luck for
Wrykyn, as it had saved them from what would probably have been a record
hammering, Ripton having eight of their last year's team left, including
Dixon, the fast bowler, against whom Mike alone of the Wrykyn team had
been able to make runs in the previous season. Altogether, Wrykyn had
struck a bad patch.

Mike mourned over his suffering school. If only he could have been there
to help. It might have made all the difference. In school cricket one
good batsman, to go in first and knock the bowlers off their length, may
take a weak team triumphantly through a season. In school cricket the
importance of a good start for the first wicket is incalculable.

As he put Strachan's letter away in his pocket, all his old bitterness
against Sedleigh, which had been ebbing during the past few days,
returned with a rush. He was conscious once more of that feeling of
personal injury which had made him hate his new school on the first
day of term.

And it was at this point, when his resentment was at its height, that
Adair, the concrete representative of everything Sedleighan, entered
the room.

There are moments in life's placid course when there has got to be the
biggest kind of row. This was one of them.

Psmith, who was leaning against the mantelpiece, reading the serial
story in a daily paper which he had abstracted from the senior day room,
made the