"Now, Mr… er?" I began.

"October," he said easily.

"Not Mister. Earl."

"October… as the month?" It was October at the time.

"As the month," he assented.

I looked at him curiously. He was not my idea of an earl. He looked like a hard-headed company chairman on holiday. Then it occurred to me that there was no bar to an earl being a company chairman as well, and that quite probably some of them needed to be.

"I have acted on impulse, coming here," he said more coherently.

"And I am not sure that it is ever a good thing to do." He paused, took out a machine-turned gold cigarette case, and gained time for thought while he flicked his lighter. I waited.

He smiled briefly.

"Perhaps I had better start by saying that I am in Australia on business I have interests in Sydney but that I came down here to the Snowies as the last part of a private tour I have been making of your main racing and breeding centres. I am a member of the body which governs National Hunt racing that is to say, steeple chasing jump racing in England, and naturally your horses interest me enormously… Well, I was lunching in Perlooma," he went on, referring to our nearest township, fifteen miles away, 'and I got talking to a man who remarked on my English accent and said that the only other Pommie he knew was a stable hand here who was fool enough to want to go back home. "

"Yes," I agreed.

"Simmons."

"Arthur Simmons," he said, nodding.

"What sort of man is he?"

"Very good with horses," I said.

"But he only wants to go back to England when he's drunk. And he only gets drunk in Perlooma. Never here."

"Oh," he said.

"Then wouldn't he go, if he were given the chance?"

"I don't know. It depends what you want him for."