his simple favour, why then you
must sign the business over to Jimmy here."

"No, you don't," answered Jimmy, and in accents commendably clear
considering that he uttered them with his nose deep in the tankard of
mulled ale. "Up to now I have played the good boy who is seen but
not heard. I break the self-imposed silence only to say: 'Woe betide
the man who attempts to complicate my overdraft!'"

I addressed myself to Jack. "You'll be wanting money sent to you
from time to time, and I'm to transmit.--Is that the idea?"

He nodded.

"Where am I to send it?"

"That's the uncertainty, of course. From time to time I shall keep
you informed. It may be to a suburban villa, it may be to some
_Poste Restante_ in the Sahara. That's as the chase goes. Like Baal
I shall be on a journey, or I shall be pursuing. Yes, anyway I shall
be pursuing. . . . All I ask is that, on getting a call, you'll send
out, as best you can, such-and-such a sum to the address indicated.
You have between 6000 and 7000 pounds sterling to play with.
Probably you will be surprised at my moderation in demanding: but
anyway I shall keep well within the limit. My memory and the
bank-book usually balance to a pound or two."

"Then it's travel you're after?" I asked.

He nodded. "On a journey--_and_ pursuing."

"Big game?"

"You may call it the biggest. Or I'm out to make it the biggest.
. . . Jimmy, pass me the tobacco." He took the jar and, filling his
pipe, lay back in the wicker chair with something like a groan.
"Roddy, can't you _see_? These years, as you know, I've been working
up my inquiry into rage in animals; beginning, that is, with animals,
but always, as you know, intending to carry the inquiry up as soon as
I had a solid working basis. Yes, it was all to proceed on
induction--laborious tests, classifications--you know the system and
that I didn't care if it took a lifetime. Well, all of a sudden, as
I'm beginning to realise that, though the process is sound--must be
sound--pursuit is probably hopeless because it must take twenty
lifetimes--of a sudden, I say, this new way is revealed. Put it that
I've come, all of a start, upon a little stream called Rubicon.
Put it that I've burnt--no, put it that Farrell's myrmidons have
burnt, at a stroke, every boat for me.

"--I might have gone on for years upon years, collecting statistics
and ploughing out conclusions. . . . I begin to believe in the
calculated interposition of