another minute I could hardly keep my eyes open. I realized
then that I was fairly poisoned with some subtle drug. If I left the
house at all in that state, I must leave the spoil behind, or be found
drunk in the gutter with my head on the swag itself. In any case I
should have been picked up and run in, and that might have led to
anything."

"So you rang me up!"

"It was my last brilliant inspiration--a sort of flash in the
brain-pan before the end--and I remember very little about it. I was
more asleep than awake at the time."

"You sounded like it, Raffles, now that one has the clue."

"I can't remember a word I said, or what was the end of it, Bunny."

"You fell in a heap before you came to the end."

"You didn't hear that through the telephone?"

"As though we had been in the same room: only I thought it was Maguire
who had stolen a march on you and knocked you out."

I had never seen Raffles more interested and impressed; but at this
point his smile altered, his eyes softened, and I found my hand in
his.

"You thought that, and yet you came like a shot to do battle for my
body with Barney Maguire! Jack-the-Giant-killer wasn't in it with you,
Bunny!"

"It was no credit to me--it was rather the other thing," said I,
remembering my rashness and my luck, and confessing both in a breath.
"You know old Swigger Morrison?" I added in final explanation. "I had
been dining with him at his club!"

Raffles shook his long old head. And the kindly light in his eyes was
still my infinite reward.

"I don't care," said he, "how deeply you had been dining: _in vino
veritas_, Bunny, and your pluck would always out! I have never doubted
it, and I never shall. In fact, I rely on nothing else to get us out
of this mess."

My face must have fallen, as my heart sank at these words. I had said
to myself that we were out of the mess already--that we had merely to
make a clean escape from the house--now the easiest thing in the
world. But as I looked at Raffles, and as Raffles looked at me, on the
threshold of the room where the three sleepers slept on without sound
or movement, I grasped the real problem that lay before us. It was
twofold; and the funny thing was that I had seen both horns of the
dilemma for myself, before Raffles came to his senses. But with
Raffles in his right mind, I had ceased to apply my own, or to carry
my share of our common burden another inch. It had been an unconscious
withdrawal on my part, a