“It appears that on the evening after the Ebor, Terry and Lavender were in the bar of the Black Swan Hotel having drinks.

“‘I had done pretty well over Peppercorn’s fiasco,’ he explained, ’but poor old Lavender was very much down in the dumps; he had held only a few very small bets against the favourite, and the rest of the day had been a poor one with him.  I asked him if he had any bets with the owner of Peppercorn, and he told me that he only held one for less than L500.

“’I laughed and said that if he held one for L5000 it would make no difference, as from what I had heard from the other fellows, Lord Arthur Skelmerton must be about stumped.  Lavender seemed terribly put out at this, and swore he would get that L500 out of Lord Arthur, if no one else got another penny from him.

“‘It’s the only money I’ve made to-day,’ he says to me.  ’I mean to get it.’

“‘You won’t,’ I says.

“‘I will,’ he says.

“‘You will have to look pretty sharp about it then,’ I says, ’for every one will be wanting to get something, and first come first served.’

“‘Oh!  He’ll serve me right enough, never you mind!’ says Lavender to me with a laugh.  ’If he don’t pay up willingly, I’ve got that in my pocket which will make him sit up and open my lady’s eyes and Sir John Etty’s too about their precious noble lord.’

“’Then he seemed to think he had gone too far, and wouldn’t say anything more to me about that affair.  I saw him on the course the next day.  I asked him if he had got his L500.  He said:  “No, but I shall get it to-day."’

“Lord Arthur Skelmerton, after having given his own evidence, had left the court; it was therefore impossible to know how he would take this account, which threw so serious a light upon an association with the dead man, of which he himself had said nothing.

“Nothing could shake James Terry’s account of the facts he had placed before the jury, and when the police informed the coroner that they proposed to place George Higgins himself in the witness-box, as his evidence would prove, as it were, a complement and corollary of that of Terry, the jury very eagerly assented.

“If James Terry, the bookmaker, loud, florid, vulgar, was an unprepossessing individual, certainly George Higgins, who was still under the accusation of murder, was ten thousand times more so.

“None too clean, slouchy, obsequious yet insolent, he was the very personification of the cad who haunts the racecourse and who lives not so much by his own wits as by the lack of them in others.  He described himself as a turf commission agent, whatever that may be.