Except for his refusal to tell anything whatever of the story of how he had brought the plague ship through the Great Barrier Reef, Allen had been very courteous and agreeable to the pressmen. They all agreed that he was in good fettle--quite full of beans. Indeed, it was Allen who did all of the interviewing. Persistently refusing to answer any questions about himself, he was avid of interest concerning all that had happened in the racing world during his absence. What were the real facts behind the breakdown of the Colchester filly after she had won the Victoria National so handily? Who was that colt _Ballarat Boy_ out of?--the one that had upset all the dope in the spring meet at Adelaide. Were Tod Sloan and Skeets Martin still piling up wins in England? What was the secret of their success? Was there any chance of these or any other of the Yank jockeys coming to Australia?
Answering such questions as these for an hour was the way that bunch of high-salaried feature writers interviewed the Hon. Hartley Allen. And when, as one of them put it in somewhat mixed simile, they were "pumped dry as a last year's dope sheet," the hero announced that the interview was over.
Disappointed in their endeavours to pry any pearls from the oyster into which Allen (for reasons best known to himself) had metamorphosed himself, the correspondents made the best of a bad job by playing up the modesty of the man they had been sent a thousand miles or so to interview. Modest was an adjective that--in the light of what most of them knew of Allen's past--it hadn't occurred to any of them to use before. Now, however, they made up for lost time. The modest hero did this, or the modest hero said that.... There was modesty in the way he stroked his chin, in the shrug of his shoulders, in the way he crossed and uncrossed his legs when sitting. His habit of looking sideways when speaking was rated as a sign of modesty; so was the trick of stroking his cheroot between thumb and forefinger as he smoked. _Modest_--_hero_--those words became permanently wedded in my mind during the week that I was reading leaders written with them for an inspiration, the report of sermons preached with them as a text. I cannot hear the one of them to this day without thinking of the other. _Modest hero!_ In the estimation of the public "Slant" Allen, whom I had always thought of as the most egotistic man I had ever known, remained that to the--until public estimation ceased to interest him.