Larry Lyburn had a face which, in colour and expression, was exactly like a wedge of double Gloucester cheese. He was the helper in the stable, and lived over the horses. Dan, the coachman, had a cottage near the gamekeeper’s.

Larry had champagne-bottle shoulders, rather bowed legs, and a back like the hind view of a lobster. He was a decent-living man, a superb horseman, an excellent groom, and a heaven-born vet. He was nothing else. If his character had been cut out of cardboard the line of demarcation between living efficiency and dead blankness could not have been more sharply defined. Larry was not only entirely and utterly destitute of all—even the most rudimentary—knowledge of Politics, Astronomy, Art, Literature (including writing and spelling) and Geography, but he was destitute also of the power of acquiring such knowledge, or the wish to do so. He was a living example of what horses can do for a man if he devotes himself to them properly, and to nothing else.

Tell him to do a stable job, and everything would be done well and up to time, but send him on the simplest business into the outside world beyond the smell of ammonia, and everything would be muddled. He would have made a splendid ambassador to the Huhyhnms, but for anything else in the universe beyond his work he was worthless.

This was Larry, sober. “Once in a while,” Larry got drunk. That is a plain statement of the fact. The whisky flew to his head, and one may amuse oneself with imagining the consternation of the whisky fiend on finding itself in such a skull. The man could not be made speechless, because he was always speechless; nor talkative, because he had nothing to talk about. He could not be made to blunder worse in the ordinary affairs of life.

On these occasions Larry made mistakes in his work, but it is only fair to him to say they were very rare occasions.

He was standing in the harness room cleaning a bit with sand by the light of a lantern, when Patsy appeared to summon him to help in fixing up the burglar trap.

“Larry,” said Patsy, sticking his head in through the half-open door. “Oh, there you are. Mr Fanshawe wants you in the house.”

“I’m finishin’ clanin’ me harness,” replied Larry. (Mr Lyburn always spoke of the harness as his personal property, also of the horses.)

“How much more of it have you to clane?”

“Nothin’.”

“Well, finish it up in a hurry,” said Patsy, “for he’s waitin’ till you come.”

“Get off that chist!” cried Larry, polishing away at the bit, as Patsy made to take his seat on a big corn-bin whose lid did duty for a table. “Get off that chist, or I’ll land you a wan wid me fut.”

Patsy got off the chest.

Mr Lyburn was very touchy about a lot of things, and he expressed himself directly; it was part of the cardboard nature of the individual: he had no nuances of expression.

He had cleaned the bit with sand, he was now polishing it with a chamois-leather and loving tenderness. If Larry was a living example of what horses can do for a man, the harness room was an object-lesson of what a man can do for harness. It was good to look at the glossy, nut-brown, pig-skin saddles on their rests, the suits of carriage harness, each complete and in its proper place.

“Lave down that whip, or I’ll be takin’ the butt of it to you!” cried Larry.

Patsy put the whip aside and waited, making no attempt at conversation, which he knew would be useless.

When the bit was polished to satisfaction and placed aside, Larry looked around to see that everything was in its place, blew out the stable lantern, closed the door, and prepared to follow Patsy into the house.

It will be noticed that he did not enquire of Patsy what business Mr Fanshawe wanted him upon.

Led by Patsy, he entered the house by the kitchen entrance.

Patsy’s room, as we have said, was on the ground-floor. The other servants’ rooms were at the top of the house, but the page-boy at Glen Druid always inhabited a room on the ground-floor, near the plate pantry.

It was five minutes past ten; most of the servants had gone up to bed, and nobody saw them as they went down the passage to the room, where, lit by a candle burning on the chest of drawers, a coil of rope, a huge pulley, some carpenter’s tools, and half a dozen long screws lay on the bed. A step-ladder stood in the middle of the room under the beam in the ceiling.

“You wait here,” said Patsy, “till I tell Mr Fanshawe. Don’t be movin’ from the room; and if any one comes, say you’ve come to help fix the window sash.”

“Off with you!” replied Larry.

Lady Seagrave, Uncle Molyneux, Violet Lestrange and General Grampound were playing bridge in the drawing-room when Patsy appeared with the announcement, that Larry Lyburn wanted to see Mr Fanshawe on account of one of the horses.

Dicky, who had excused himself from bridge, alleging a headache, left the room with a glance at Violet—an ocular kiss unnoticed by the others in the ferment of mind caused by the General, who was going the grand slam.

“Larry’s waitin’, sir,” said Patsy.

“Come on,” replied Mr Fanshawe.

They reached the room unnoticed, and Larry greeted Mr Fanshawe with a touch of an imaginary hat.

“That’s right,” said Dicky, looking at the things on the bed—“everything is here. Does Larry know what we’re about?”

“No, sir,” said Patsy.

“Well, see here,” said Mr Fanshawe, turning to the stable-man, “a burglar is going to break into the house to-night, and I’m going to catch him.”

Mr Fanshawe made the statement, as we make many statements in this life, little knowing how much it implied, for, as a matter of fact, the thing he was about to catch or lose that night was not so much Paddy Murphy as his future happiness.

How Mr Murphy could possibly be bound up with that blissful condition you will not discover, however, till you have read the last pages of this story.

“Yes, sor,” said Larry, as unmoved as though it were some minor stable matter about which Mr Fanshawe had spoken.

“I want you to help.”

“Yes, sor.”

“You see that rope?”

“Yes, sor.”

“I’m going to screw that pulley on to the beam.”

“Yes, sor.”

“We’ll put the rope through the pulley and a running noose at the end of the rope.”

“Yes, sor. Axing your pardon, sor, I don’t mind helpin’ in the fixin’ and the bindin’ of him, but I’d rather lave the stretchin’ of him to you, sor.”

“The what?”

“The stretchin’, sor.”

“The hangin’ he means, sir,” said Patsy. “Sure, Larry, that’s not what Misther Fanshawe’s afther.”

“Good God!” said Dicky, “you didn’t think I was going to hang the man!”

Larry scratched his head.

“I thought be the rope, sor——”

“Come on,” said Mr Fanshawe, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”

He got on the step-ladder and fixed the pulley tight on to the beam with long screws. At one end of the rope, he made a huge running noose, large enough for the body of a man to pass through, then he pulled up the window sash and tacked the upper part of the noose to the lower part of the sash lightly with tin tacks, so that a strong pull would fetch the whole thing away. He passed the free end of the rope through the pulley. A man entering the window would pass through the noose.

“See!” said Mr Fanshawe. “We will leave the window just like that; it’s a warm night outside.”

“Yes, sor.”

“It’s now eleven,” said Mr Fanshawe, “and we have an hour to wait. Patsy will stand by the window, I’ll sit on the bed with this end of the rope in my hand, you sit beside me. When I give the word, and not before, haul for all you’re worth; it will take the two of us to swing him up. Patsy, take the step-ladder away. I shall go and have a whisky and soda, and be back in twenty minutes. You stay here, Larry.”

“Yes, sor.”