murdered there."

"I'm not so sure he--" began Brown, and stopped.

"Not so sure he was murdered?" queried his companion.

"Not so sure he was murdered out of the season," answered the little
priest, with simplicity. "Don't you think there's something rather
tricky about this solitude, Flambeau? Do you feel sure a wise murderer
would always want the spot to be lonely? It's very, very seldom a man is
quite alone. And, short of that, the more alone he is, the more certain
he is to be seen. No; I think there must be some other--Why, here we are
at the Pavilion or Palace, or whatever they call it."

They had emerged on a small square, brilliantly lighted, of which the
principal building was gay with gilding, gaudy with posters, and flanked
with two giant photographs of Malvoli and Nigger Ned.

"Hallo!" cried Flambeau in great surprise, as his clerical friend
stumped straight up the broad steps. "I didn't know pugilism was your
latest hobby. Are you going to see the fight?"

"I don't think there will be any fight," replied Father Brown.

They passed rapidly through ante-rooms and inner rooms; they passed
through the hall of combat itself, raised, roped, and padded with
innumerable seats and boxes, and still the cleric did not look round
or pause till he came to a clerk at a desk outside a door marked
"Committee". There he stopped and asked to see Lord Pooley.

The attendant observed that his lordship was very busy, as the fight
was coming on soon, but Father Brown had a good-tempered tedium of
reiteration for which the official mind is generally not prepared. In a
few moments the rather baffled Flambeau found himself in the presence of
a man who was still shouting directions to another man going out of the
room. "Be careful, you know, about the ropes after the fourth--Well, and
what do you want, I wonder!"

Lord Pooley was a gentleman, and, like most of the few remaining to our
race, was worried--especially about money. He was half grey and half
flaxen, and he had the eyes of fever and a high-bridged, frost-bitten
nose.

"Only a word," said Father Brown. "I have come to prevent a man being
killed."

Lord Pooley bounded off his chair as if a spring had flung him from it.
"I'm damned if I'll stand any more of this!" he cried. "You and your
committees and parsons and petitions! Weren't there parsons in the old
days, when they fought without gloves? Now they're fighting with the
regulation gloves, and there's not th