“If you’re as hard up as that,” objected Dunhill, “how are you going to put in your share of the pool?” A pained, almost a stunned, look came into Ukridge’s eyes. He gazed at Dunhill through his lop-sided pince-nez as one who speculates as to whether his hearing has deceived him. “Me?” he cried. “Me? I like that! Upon my Sam, that’s rich! Why, damme, if there’s any justice in the world, if there’s a spark of decency and good feeling in your bally bosoms, I should think you would let me in free for suggesting the idea. It’s a little hard! I supply the brains and you want me to cough up cash as well. My gosh, I didn’t expect this. This hurts me, by George! If anybody had told me that an old pal would——” “Oh, all right,” said Robert Dunhill. “All right, all right, all right. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you draw the lot it’ll be the happiest day of my life.” “I sha’n’t,” said Ukridge. “Something tells me that I shan’t.” Nor did he. When, in a solemn silence broken only by the sound of a distant waiter quarrelling with the cook down a speaking-tube, we had completed the drawing, the man of destiny was Teddy Weeks. I suppose that even in the springtime of Youth, when broken limbs seems a lighter matter than they become later in life, it can never be an unmixedly agreeable thing to have to go out into the public highways and try to make an accident happen to one. In such circumstances the reflection that you are thereby benefiting your friends brings but slight balm. To Teddy Weeks it appeared to bring no balm at all. That he was experiencing a certain disinclination to sacrifice himself for the public good became more and more evident as the days went by and found him still intact. Ukridge, when he called upon me to discuss the matter, was visibly perturbed. He sank into a chair beside the table at which I was beginning my modest morning meal, and, having drunk half my coffee, sighed deeply. “Upon my Sam,” he moaned, “it’s a little disheartening. I strain my brain to think up schemes for getting us all a bit of money just at the moment when we are all needing it most, and when I hit on what is probably the simplest and yet ripest notion of our time, this blighter Weeks goes and lets me down by shirking his plain duty. It’s just my luck that a fellow like that should have drawn the lot. And the worst of it is, laddie, that, now we’ve started with him, we’ve got to keep on. We can’t possibly raise enough money to pay yearly subscriptions for anybody else. It’s Weeks or nobody.” “I suppose we must give him time.”