A Javelin for Jonah Read Online Free PDF

seemed all right then. Jones was advising him to get a bit more flight, but everybody tells him that.”
    “You may well ask what happened,” said Jerry. “That lunatic Jones took it upon himself to coach Colin as soon as you had gone over to the pool. Finding that the cane hurdle didn’t seem to help Colin to get height, what does that gor-blimey fool do but bring over one of those heavy benches which the students sit on when they take off their track-suits or change out of their spikes.”
    “You don’t mean he put a teak bench across the long-jump pit?” asked Hamish incredulously. “Why, Colin comes powering down that run-way at the rate of knots and is going like a bullet when he takes off from the board. No wonder he’s knocked himself out. Jones must be mad!”
    “We’ll be lucky if it’s only broken shins,” said Celia. “I’ve had a bit of nursing experience, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the boy has internal injuries as well. He might have killed himself. Jones is just that much lucky that he didn’t.”
    “But what made Colin fall in with such a crazy idea?” asked Martin. “Did Jonah bully him?”
    “No, he egged him on, according to the girl Clarice, and then, when Colin jibbed, he taunted him with being yellow. Naturally the misguided kid couldn’t stand for that,” said Henry. “Apparently Jonah had worked it out that the very fact that Colin would hurt himself if he didn’t clear the bench would make sure that he did manage to jump over it—only, of course, he didn’t. It seems (again according to our eye-witness) that Colin tore down the runway, took off like a tornado, copped the beastly bench ankle-high, and that was that.”
    “Honestly, Jonah ought to be certified!” said Martin. “You never know what stupid trick he’ll get up to next. Did you hear what he did to one of Celia’s divers?”
    “He shouldn’t be allowed at large,” said Lesley.
    “He ought to be poisoned,” said Jerry.
    “Well, don’t let the students hear you say so. There is more than one who might take the hint,” said Henry. “We’ve got quite a few nut cases here, you know.”
    “I wish one of our psychopaths would lay him out,” said Lesley. “He came into my gym the other day and that silly little Carol took her eye off what she was doing and pulled a muscle because she didn’t make a proper landing. That’s the second one of my special squad he’s managed to lay out. He told Margot to rake the long-jump pit the other day, and she’s slipped a disc. This was before he managed to put Colin out of action. I was absolutely livid about it. ‘There goes the Chronos Vase, and it’s all your fault, you incompetent, poke-nosed, drunken idiot!’ I said to him. ‘Why on earth, if you had to interfere with the long-jump, couldn’t you get one of the men to rake the pit?’
    “ ‘Oh, an osteopath will soon put the wench right,’ says Jonah, ‘or I’ll do a spot of manipulation on her myself, if you like.’ I was so furious with him that I picked up a jumping-rope and swung the leather-covered, sandbagged end of it at his head. He was actually grinning, you know, as though he’d said something clever. ‘I’d like to kill you!’ I said. ‘And I would kill you if I ever found you putting your filthy hands on one of the girls.’ What do you say?” she concluded, turning to Henry.
    “ Do your gym squad stand any chance of lifting the Chronos Vase?” asked Henry.
    “Not now we’ve had these accidents.”
    “Then I think,” said Henry, getting up from table, “that, if you do kill him, you are also entitled to dance on the remains.”

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chapter 3
Blots on a Copybook
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    J oynings had been established originally by a syndicate of do-gooders who had bought the house and its grounds and had drawn up the College constitution. Gascoigne Medlar was not, in actuality, its first Warden, although he boasted that the College was his own foundation. The first Warden had been