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.