“Partly. Go on,” Bony urged.

“Ben andme wasdrinkin ’ gin that time he perished. He was laughing at things he was seeing on his legs and feet, pointing at them, and laughing so he couldn’t describe ’emto me. Them things wasn’t caused by the gin, and they wasn’t even the whisky hoo-jahs, ’cosyou don’t laugh at them. For two days we’d been seeing the gin hoo-jahs-things that creep up behind you and vanish when you try to look straight at ’em. So it wasn’t the gin that tossed him.”

“Throughout the day before he died, your friend was seeing things from the corners of his eyes… as you were doing?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Inspector.”

“What would he have been drinking to produce the effects on him which you saw that morning, when you found him sitting up and laughing and pointing to things on his legs?”

“General mixture of beer, spirits and sherry.”

Bony pondered, and Knocker Harris brought his chair to sit at the table.

“Last night in Adelaide,” Bony said, “I was introduced to several habitual drunks by a sergeant of the Vice Squad. One victim said that the hoo-jahs, to employ your name for them, always dropped on him from the ceiling. Another told us that the hoo-jahs came from nowhere and crawled all over him. Yet another victim said he had a pet hoo-jah with legs sticking up from its head and three eyes in its stomach. And so on. I have to admit that all these persons mixed their drinks, with the exception of a woman who invariably drank sherry. Have you ever had the hoo-jahs on wine?”

Mr. Luton shuddered.

“Once. A long time before I fell in with Ben. Neverno more. They pulled my hair out in chunks, and then my whiskers. After that they nipped out all me body hairs, one at a time. And now and then they threw things at me-a bale of wool, a bullock, a planet. And never missed.”