"How
are you?"
"I guess I'd be the better for a drink," Pritchard declared.
"Come along. Pretty well done up the other night, weren't we?
We'll step into the American Bar here and try a gin fizz."
They found themselves presently perched upon two high stools in a
deserted corner of the bar to which Pritchard had led the way.
Tavernake sipped his drink tentatively.
"I should like," he said, "to ask you a question or two about
Wednesday night."
Pritchard nodded.
"Go right ahead," he invited.
"You seem to take the whole affair as a sort of joke," Tavernake
remarked.
"Well, isn't that what it was?" the detective asked, smiling.
Tavernake shrugged his shoulders.
"There didn't seem to me to be much joke about it!" he exclaimed.
Pritchard laughed gayly.
"You are not used to Americans, my young friend," he said. "Over
on this side you are all so fearfully literal. You are not
seriously supposing that they meant to dose me with that stuff
the other night, eh?"
"I never thought that there was any doubt about it at all,"
Tavernake declared deliberately.
Pritchard stroked his moustache meditatively.
"Well," he remarked, "you are certainly green, and yet I don't
know why you shouldn't be. Americans are always up to games of
that sort. I am not saying that they didn't mean to give me a
scare, if they could, or that they wouldn't have been glad to get
a few words of information out of me, or a paper or two that I
keep pretty safely locked up.
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