Stone took his brown head out of the towel in which he had been rubbing it.
“Unless you’re too blooming omniscient to want evidence,” said Bags.
“Because you’re a sneak. Because I jolly well hurt you last night, and you said I hadn’t to put me off the scent,” said David with a sudden inspiration. “Why, you’ve got a bruise as big as a football,” he cried, pointing to the injured part of Bags’s anatomy, “and yet you said it didn’t hurt. It must have hurt: it’s all rot to say it didn’t. And you said it was _pax_ in order to put me off the look-out.”
“Bosh: that’s not evidence,” said Ferrers, whose father was a K.C., and was much looked up to on points of school-law. “That’s only your blooming guess.”
“Well, it would be evidence if I found the Monarch in his beastly cubicle,” said David. “Or perhaps you’d say that stags can fly, and that the Monarch had only flown there.”
This was sarcasm of the deepest dye, and produced its due effect on all the boys who, in various stages of undress, surrounded the two, except Stone, who never could understand what sarcasm meant.
“Oh rot, Blazes,” said he. “At that rate the Monarch may have flown to my cubicle, but I’m not going to have you search it and turn everything upside down for the sake of a sickly stag-beetle.”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t make a challenge out of it, Blazes,” he said, disregarding the obtuse Stone. “If you’re so certain of it, you can challenge Bags to allow you to search his cubicle, an’ if you don’t find the Monarch there, he gives you three cuts of the hardest with a racquet-handle and _pax_ immediately afterwards.”
David was standing in his bath, and, slipping, plumped down into it heaving out solid water.
“Sorry, you fellows,” he said to those who were wettest. “Right then, I challenge.”
Bags had moved away, in the general stampede caused by David’s plunge, and on the instant, with fresh suspicions teeming in his head, David jumped out, and got between him and the door of the big bath-room.
“I say, Bags, you haven’t had your bath,” he said; “and were you going back without it? Aren’t you going to have a bath? Not feeling dirty? Anyhow, I challenge. Do you accept it?”
“Oh, you thought I was going back to dormitory to put them in your cubicle again, did you?” he said. “It just happens to be my bath there by the door.”