if I hadn't been a mud-headed mucker I should have stripped to the
waist. Obviously. Feel my sleeves, Bensington! I'm wet through with
perspiration. Jolly hard to think of everything. Only a half way-up of
whisky can save me from a cold."


VII.

There were moments during that wonderful night when it seemed to
Bensington that he was planned by nature for a life of fantastic
adventure. This was particularly the case for an hour or so after he had
taken a stiff whisky. "Shan't go back to Sloane Street," he confided to
the tall, fair, dirty engineer.

"You won't, eh?"

"No fear," said Bensington, nodding darkly.

The exertion of dragging the seven dead rats to the funeral pyre by the
nettle grove left him bathed in perspiration, and Cossar pointed out the
obvious physical reaction of whisky to save him from the otherwise
inevitable chill. There was a sort of brigand's supper in the old
bricked kitchen, with the row of dead rats lying in the moonlight
against the hen-runs outside, and after thirty minutes or so of rest,
Cossar roused them all to the labours that were still to do.
"Obviously," as he said, they had to "wipe the place out. No litter--no
scandal. See?" He stirred them up to the idea of making destruction
complete. They smashed and splintered every fragment of wood in the
house; they built trails of chopped wood wherever big vegetation was
springing; they made a pyre for the rat bodies and soaked them in