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of the gang about.
    I ran back to Sir John, expecting to find him up and about, ready to pursue his attacker on his own, calling down heaven’s wrath upon the villain. But no, he lay crumpled where I had pushed him, apparently unable to pull himself to his feet. Was he hit? Was he dead? I had not even considered such a possibility.
    Kneeling down beside him, I saw that he was breathing — shallowly, yet breathing nevertheless.
    “Sir John,” I whispered urgently, ” you are wounded. Can you tell me where you were hit?”
    “Shoulder,” said he, panting, “in the shoulder.”
    Gingerly, I pulled back his coat and saw the blood spread upon his white linen shirt. “I must get you to Mr. Donnelly.”
    “To Mr. Bilbo. Take me there.” He seemed now to be gathering strength. “Jeremy,” said Sir John, “what did the fellow look like?”
    “I … I’m not sure, sir.” And indeed I wasn’t, for all had happened so very quickly. But I concentrated upon the picture I held in my mind. And then I had something — to me, a quite unexpected something — that I might report.
    “Sir, I believe he was a black man.”

TWO
In Which Sir John
Appoints Me to an
Interim Position

    Of all that happened following this astonishing and frightening event, I shall speak only briefly and in summary.
    After having made my declaration to Sir John, I heard running footsteps from the direction whence we had come. I cocked the loaded pistol and made ready to shoot, should it be another assassin come to finish the work of the first. But no, it was Mr. Brede, who, having heard shots fired, had come in all haste. Together, we carried him to Mr. Bilbo’s house, which was not so far away. Mr. Burnham came in answer to Mr. Brede s urgent thumping upon the door. I responded to the challenge issued from inside and told what had happened. The door swung open, revealing Mr. Burnham, pistol in hand, looking, somehow as if he had just come in. I noted the constable’s surprise at the tutor’s dark face. As soon as we had Sir John lying comfortably upon a sofa, Mr. Brede ran off to fetch Gabriel Donnelly, the medical examiner for Westminster who was, luckily, still nearby at Lord Lilley’s performing his official duties.
    Through it all, Sir John had remained conscious. In fact, by the time we laid him down upon the sofa, he was more responsive, more talkative, than when we had picked him up from the pavement of St. James Street. He had kept up a steady stream of cautions and warnings. In spite of his wound — and as yet we knew not whether or not it be serious — he was truly still in command.
    Mr. Donnelly, who had only a few years past been a ship’s surgeon in the Royal Navy, had in his day treated many (did he say hundreds?) of such gunshot wounds. After boiling his instruments — Jimmie Bunkins wakened the cook, who saw to this — he removed the bullet and bound the wound. By this time Sir John was dutifully drunk from Mr. Bilbo’s best brandy. When the surgeon had done, he pronounced the wound “serious enough, though by no means mortal.” He did caution, however, that the wound must be kept clean and the dressing changed once a day. (Hardly necessary in my case, for I had seen in Mr. Cowley an example of what might happen when one was irresponsible in caring for a wound; a gangrenous state, which led to the amputation of his left leg.)
    “And where will you be?” he asked the magistrate.
    “Where will I be? What a question!” Sir John, still drunk, slurred these words considerably so that they were barely comprehensible, even to me. “I’ll be at Number 4 Bow Street, where I belong.”
    “No he won’t. He’ll be right here.” It was Mr. Bilbo, thumping into the room, loud as he liked, as befit the proper master of the house. Bunkins had gone off to the gaming establishment to fetch his master that he might know of his friend’s misfortune.
    “I’ll go home if I wish … wish to.” Indeed, it was barely possible to