"Oh!" said Hamilton, when he had finished. "It sounds good."
"Sounds good!" scoffed Bones. "Dear old sceptical one, that car..."
And so forth.
All excesses being their own punishment, two days later Bones renewed
an undesirable acquaintance. In the early days of Schemes, Ltd., Mr.
Augustus Tibbetts had purchased a small weekly newspaper called the
Flame. Apart from the losses he incurred during its short career,
the experience was made remarkable by the fact that he became
acquainted with Mr. Jelf, a young and immensely self-satisfied man in
pince-nez, who habitually spoke uncharitably of bishops, and never
referred to members of the Government without causing sensitive people
to shudder.
The members of the Government retaliated by never speaking of Jelf at
all, so there was probably some purely private feud between them.
Jelf disapproved of everything. He was twenty-four years of age, and
he, too, had made the acquaintance of the Hindenburg Line. Naturally
Bones thought of Jelf when he purchased the Flame.
From the first Bones had run the Flame with the object of exposing
things. He exposed Germans, Swedes, and Turks--which was safe. He
exposed a furniture dealer who had made him pay twice for an article
because a receipt was lost, and that cost money. He exposed a man who
had been very rude to him in the City. He would have exposed James
Jacobus Jelf, only that individual showed such eagerness to expose his
own shortcomings, at a guinea a column, that Bones had lost interest.
His stock of personal grievances being exhausted, he had gone in for a
general line of exposure which embraced members of the aristocracy and
the Stock Exchange.
If Bones did not like a man's face, he exposed him. He had a column
headed "What I Want to Know," and signed "Senob." in which such
pertinent queries appeared as: "When will the naughty old lord who owns a sky-blue motor-car, and
wears pink spats, realise that his treatment of his tenants is a
disgrace to his ancient lineage?"
This was one of James Jacobus Jelf's contributed efforts. It happened
on this particular occasion that there was only one lord in England who
owned a sky-blue car and blush-rose spats, and it cost Bones two
hundred pounds to settle his lordship.
Soon after this, Bones disposed of the paper, and instructed Mr. Jelf
not to call again unless he called in an ambulance--an instruction
which afterwards filled him with apprehension, since he knew that J. J.
J. would charge up the ambulance to the office.
Thus matters stood two days after his car had made its public
appearance, and Bones sat confronting the busy pages of his garage bill.
On this day he had had his lunch brought into the office, and he was in
a maze of calculation, when there came a knock at the door.