e second minute Garnet
cross-countered with "All's Fair in Love and War." Conscience down and
out. The winner left the ring without a mark.

* * * * *

I rose, feeling much refreshed.

That afternoon I interviewed Mr. Hawk in the bar-parlour of the Net and
Mackerel.

"Hawk," I said to him darkly, over a mystic and conspirator-like pot of
ale, "I want you, next time you take Professor Derrick out
fishing"--here I glanced round, to make sure that we were not
overheard--"to upset him."

His astonished face rose slowly from the pot of ale like a full moon.

"What 'ud I do that for?" he gasped.

"Five shillings, I hope," said I, "but I am prepared to go to ten."

He gurgled.

I encored his pot of ale.

He kept on gurgling.

I argued with the man.

I spoke splendidly. I was eloquent, but at the same time concise. My
choice of words was superb. I crystallised my ideas into pithy
sentences which a child could have understood.

And at the end of half-an-hour he had grasped the salient points of the
scheme. Also he imagined that I wished the professor upset by way of a
practical joke. He gave me to understand that this was the type of
humour which was to be expected from a gentleman from London. I am
afraid he must at one period in his career have lived at one of those
watering-places at which trippers congregate. He did not seem to think
highly of the Londoner.

I let it rest at that. I could not give my true reason, and this served
as well as any.

* * * * *

At the last moment he recollected that he, too, would get wet when the
accident took place, and he raised the price to a sovereign.

A mercenary man. It is painful to see how rapidly the old simple spirit
is dying out of our rural districts. Twenty years ago a fisherman would
have been charmed to do a little job like that for a screw of tobacco.

CHAPTER XI

THE BRAVE PRESERVER

I could have wished, during the next few days, that Mr. Harry Hawk's
attitude towards myself had not been so unctuously confidential and
mysterious. It was unnecessary, in my opinion, for him to grin
meaningly when he met me in the street. His sly wink when we passed
each other on the Cob struck me as in indifferent taste. The thing had
been definitely arranged (ten shillings down and ten when it was over),
and there was no need for any cloak and dark-lantern effects. I
objected strongly to being treated as the villain of a melodrama. I was
merely an ordinary well