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The Thirty-nine Steps
by John Buchan
June, 1996 [Etext #558]
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THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
by JOHN BUCHAN
TO
THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON
(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)
My Dear Tommy,
You and I have long cherished an affection for that
elemental type of tale which Americans call the
'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker' - the
romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and
march just inside the borders of the possible. During
an illness last winter I exhausted my store of those
aids to cheerfulness, and was driven to write one for
myself. This little volume is the result, and I should
like to put your name on it in memory of our long
friendship, in the days when the wildest fictions are so
much less improbable than the facts.
J.B.
CONTENTS
1. The Man Who Died
2. The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
3. The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
4. The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
5. The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
6. The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
7. The Dry-Fly Fisherman
8. The Coming of the Black Stone
9. The Thirty-Nine Steps
10. Various Parties Converging on the Sea
CHAPTER ONE
The Man Who Died
I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon
pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old
Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago
that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at
him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk
of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough
exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-
water that has been standing in the sun. 'Richard Hannay,' I kept
telling myself, 'you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and
you had better climb out.'
It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building
up those last years in Bulawayo. I had got my pile - not one of the
big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds
of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from
Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so
England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on
stopping there for the rest of my days.
But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I
was tired of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had had
enough of restaurants and theatres and race-meetings. I had no real
pal to go about with, which probably explains things. Plenty of
people invited me to their houses, but they didn't seem much
interested in me. They would fling me a question or two about
South Africa, and then get on their own affairs. A lot of Imperialist
ladies asked me to tea to meet schoolmasters from New Zealand
and editors from Vancouver, and that was the dismalest business of
all. Here was I, thirty-seven years old, sound in wind and limb,
with enough money to have a good time, yawning my head off all
day. I had just about settled to clear out and get back to the veld,
for I was the best bored man in the United Kingdom.
That afternoon I had been worrying my brokers about
investments to give my mind something to work on, and on my
way home I turned into my club - rather a pot-house, which took
in Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening
papers. They were full of the row in the Near East, and there was
an article about Karolides, the Greek Premier. I rather fancied the
chap. From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show;
and he played a straight game too, which was more than could be
said for most of them. I gathered that they hated him pretty blackly
in Berlin and Vienna, but that we were going to stick by him, and
one paper said that he was the only barrier between Europe and
Armageddon. I remember wondering if I could get a job in those
parts. It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might
keep a man from yawning.
About six o'clock I went home, dressed, dined at the Cafe Royal,
and turned into a music-hall. It was a silly show, all capering
women and monkey-faced men, and I did not stay long. The night
was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired near
Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy
and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to
do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had
some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a
beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At Oxford
Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would
give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if
nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.
My flat was the first floor in a new block behind Langham Place.
There was a common staircase, with a porter and a liftman at the
entrance, but there was no restaurant or anything of that sort, and
each flat was quite shut off from the others. I hate servants on the
premises, so I had a fellow to look after me who came in by the
day. He arrived before eight o'clock every morning and used to
depart at seven, for I never dined at home.
I was just fitting my key into the door when I noticed a man at
my elbow. I had not seen him approach, and the sudden appearance
made me start. He was a slim man, with a short brown beard and
small, gimlety blue eyes. I recognized him as the occupant of a flat
on the top floor, with whom I had passed the time of day on the
stairs.
'Can I speak to you?' he said. 'May I come in for a minute?' He
was steadying his voice with an effort, and his hand was pawing my arm.
I got my door open and motioned him in. No sooner was he
over the threshold than he made a dash for my back room, where I
used to smoke and write my letters. Then he bolted back.
'Is the door locked?' he asked feverishly, and he fastened the
chain with his own hand.
'I'm very sorry,' he said humbly. 'It's a mighty liberty, but you
looked the kind of man who would understand. I've had you in my
mind all this week when things got troublesome. Say, will you do
me a good turn?'
'I'll listen to you,' I said. 'That's all I'll promise.' I was getting
worried by the antics of this nervous little chap.
There was a tray of drinks on a table beside him, from which he
filled himself a stiff whisky-and-soda. He drank it off in three
gulps, and cracked the glass as he set it down.
'Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at
this moment to be dead.'
I sat down in an armchair and lit my pipe.
'What does it feel like?' I asked. I was pretty certain that I had to
deal with a madman.
A smile flickered over his drawn face. 'I'm not mad - yet. Say,
Sir, I've been watching you, and I reckon you're a cool customer. I
reckon, too, you're an honest man, and not afraid of playing a bold
hand. I'm going to confide in you. I need help worse than any man
ever needed it, and I want to know if I can count you in.'
'Get on with your yarn,' I said, 'and I'll tell you.'
He seemed to brace himself for a great effort, and then started on
the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to
stop and ask him questions. But here is the gist of it:
He was an American, from Kentucky, and after college, being
pretty well off, he had started out to see the world. He wrote a bit,
and acted as war correspondent for a Chicago paper, and spent a
year or two in South-Eastern Europe. I gathered that he was a fine
linguist, and had got to know pretty well the society in those parts.
He spoke familiarly of many names that I remembered to have seen
in the newspapers.
He had played about with politics, he told me, at first for the
interest of them, and then because he couldn't help himself. I read
him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down to
the roots of things. He got a little further down than he wanted.
I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it out.
Away behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big
subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous
people. He had come on it by accident; it fascinated him; he went
further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of the people
in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but
that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money.
A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited
the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears.
He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had
puzzled me - things that happened in the Balkan War, how one
state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and
broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war
came from. The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and
Germany at loggerheads.
When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it
would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-
pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists
would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage.
Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides,
the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.
'Do you wonder?' he cried. 'For three hundred years they have
been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The
Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to
find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have
dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und Zu Something,
an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English.
But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and
find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the
manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your
English papers the shakes. But if you're on the biggest kind of job
and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up
against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a
rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just
now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because his
aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location
on the Volga.'
I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed to have
got left behind a little.
'Yes and no,' he said. 'They won up to a point, but they struck a
bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't be bought, the old
elemental fighting instincts of man. If you're going to be killed you
invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you
survive you get to love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers
have found something they care for, and that has upset the pretty
plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven't played their
last card by a long sight. They've gotten the ace up their sleeves,
and unless I can keep alive for a month they are going to play it
and win.'
'But I thought you were dead,' I put in.
'MORS JANUA VITAE,' he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was
about all the Latin I knew.) 'I'm coming to that, but I've got to put
you wise about a lot of things first. If you read your newspaper, I
guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?'
I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that
very afternoon.
'He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the one
big brain in the whole show, and he happens also to be an honest
man. Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months
past. I found that out - not that it was difficult, for any fool could
guess as much. But I found out the way they were going to get
him, and that knowledge was deadly. That's why I have had to decease.'
He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I was
getting interested in the beggar.
'They can't get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard of
Epirotes that would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of
June he is coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has taken
to having International tea-parties, and the biggest of them is due
on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned the principal guest, and if
my friends have their way he will never return to his admiring
countrymen.'
'That's simple enough, anyhow,' I said. 'You can warn him and
keep him at home.'
'And play their game?' he asked sharply. 'If he does not come
they win, for he's the only man that can straighten out the tangle.
And if his Government are warned he won't come, for he does not
know how big the stakes will be on June the 15th.'
'What about the British Government?' I said. 'They're not going
to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the wink, and they'll take
extra precautions.'
'No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives
and double the police and Constantine would still be a
doomed man. My friends are not playing this game for candy. They
want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe
on it. He'll be murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of
evidence to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and
Berlin. It will all be an infernal lie, of course, but the case will look
black enough to the world. I'm not talking hot air, my friend. I
happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance, and I can
tell you it will be the most finished piece of blackguardism since the
Borgias. But it's not going to come off if there's a certain man who
knows the wheels of the business alive right here in London on the
15th day of June. And that man is going to be your servant,
Franklin P. Scudder.'
I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat-
trap, and there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was
spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.
'Where did you find out this story?' I asked.
'I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me
inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician
quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little
bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence
ten days ago in Paris. I can't tell you the details now, for it's
something of a history. When I was quite sure in my own mind I
judged it my business to disappear, and I reached this city by a mighty
queer circuit. I left Paris a dandified young French-American, and I
sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant. In Norway I was an
English student of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures, but when I
left Bergen I was a cinema-man with special ski films. And I came
here from Leith with a lot of pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to
put before the London newspapers. Till yesterday I thought I had
muddied my trail some, and was feeling pretty happy. Then ...'
The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some
more whisky.
'Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block. I
used to stay close in my room all day, and only slip out after dark
for an hour or two. I watched him for a bit from my window, and I
thought I recognized him ... He came in and spoke to the porter
... When I came back from my walk last night I found a card in
my letter-box. It bore the name of the man I want least to meet on
God's earth.'
I think that the look in my companion's eyes, the sheer naked
scare on his face, completed my conviction of his honesty. My own
voice sharpened a bit as I asked him what he did next.
'I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring, and that
there was only one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers knew I
was dead they would go to sleep again.'
'How did you manage it?'
'I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad, and I
got myself up to look like death. That wasn't difficult, for I'm no
slouch at disguises. Then I got a corpse - you can always get a
body in London if you know where to go for it. I fetched it back in
a trunk on the top of a four-wheeler, and I had to be assisted
upstairs to my room. You see I had to pile up some evidence for
the inquest. I went to bed and got my man to mix me a sleeping-
draught, and then told him to clear out. He wanted to fetch a
doctor, but I swore some and said I couldn't abide leeches. When I
was left alone I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size,
and I judged had perished from too much alcohol, so I put some
spirits handy about the place. The jaw was the weak point in the
likeness, so I blew it away with a revolver. I daresay there will be
somebody tomorrow to swear to having heard a shot, but there are
no neighbours on my floor, and I guessed I could risk it. So I left
the body in bed dressed up in my pyjamas, with a revolver lying on
the bed-clothes and a considerable mess around. Then I got into a
suit of clothes I had kept waiting for emergencies. I didn't dare to
shave for fear of leaving tracks, and besides, it wasn't any kind of
use my trying to get into the streets. I had had you in my mind all
day, and there seemed nothing to do but to make an appeal to you.
I watched from my window till I saw you come home, and then
slipped down the stair to meet you ... There, Sir, I guess you
know about as much as me of this business.'
He sat blinking like an owl, fluttering with nerves and yet
desperately determined. By this time I was pretty well convinced
that he was going straight with me. It was the wildest sort of
narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had
turned out to be true, and I had made a practice of judging the man
rather than the story. If he had wanted to get a location in my flat,
and then cut my throat, he would have pitched a milder yarn.
'Hand me your key,' I said, 'and I'll take a look at the corpse.
Excuse my caution, but I'm bound to verify a bit if I can.'
He shook his head mournfully. 'I reckoned you'd ask for that,
but I haven't got it. It's on my chain on the dressing-table. I had to
leave it behind, for I couldn't leave any clues to breed suspicions.
The gentry who are after me are pretty bright-eyed citizens. You'll
have to take me on trust for the night, and tomorrow you'll get
proof of the corpse business right enough.'
I thought for an instant or two. 'Right. I'll trust you for the
night. I'll lock you into this room and keep the key. just one word,
Mr Scudder. I believe you're straight, but if so be you are not I
should warn you that I'm a handy man with a gun.'
'Sure,' he said, jumping up with some briskness. 'I haven't the
privilege of your name, Sir, but let me tell you that you're a white
man. I'll thank you to lend me a razor.'
I took him into my bedroom and turned him loose. In half an
hour's time a figure came out that I scarcely recognized. Only his
gimlety, hungry eyes were the same. He was shaved clean, his hair
was parted in the middle, and he had cut his eyebrows. Further, he
carried himself as if he had been drilled, and was the very model,
even to the brown complexion, of some British officer who had
had a long spell in India. He had a monocle, too, which he stuck in
his eye, and every trace of the American had gone out of his speech.
'My hat! Mr Scudder -' I stammered.
'Not Mr Scudder,' he corrected; 'Captain Theophilus Digby, of
the 40th Gurkhas, presently home on leave. I'll thank you to
remember that, Sir.'
I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own
couch, more cheerful than I had been for the past month. Things
did happen occasionally, even in this God-forgotten metropolis.
I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce
of a row at the smoking-room door. Paddock was a fellow I had
done a good turn to out on the Selakwe, and I had inspanned him
as my servant as soon as I got to England. He had about as much
gift of the gab as a hippopotamus, and was not a great hand at
valeting, but I knew I could count on his loyalty.
'Stop that row, Paddock,' I said. 'There's a friend of mine,
Captain - Captain' (I couldn't remember the name) 'dossing down
in there. Get breakfast for two and then come and speak to me.'
I told Paddock a fine story about how my friend was a great
swell, with his nerves pretty bad from overwork, who wanted
absolute rest and stillness. Nobody had got to know he was here,
or he would be besieged by communications from the India Office
and the Prime Minister and his cure would be ruined. I am bound
to say Scudder played up splendidly when he came to breakfast. He
fixed Paddock with his eyeglass, just like a British officer, asked
him about the Boer War, and slung out at me a lot of stuff about
imaginary pals. Paddock couldn't learn to call me 'Sir', but he
'sirred' Scudder as if his life depended on it.
I left him with the newspaper and a box of cigars, and went
down to the City till luncheon. When I got back the lift-man had an
important face.
'Nawsty business 'ere this morning, Sir. Gent in No. 15 been and
shot 'isself. They've just took 'im to the mortiary. The police are
up there now.'
I ascended to No. 15, and found a couple of bobbies and an
inspector busy making an examination. I asked a few idiotic questions,
and they soon kicked me out. Then I found the man that had
valeted Scudder, and pumped him, but I could see he suspected
nothing. He was a whining fellow with a churchyard face, and half-
a-crown went far to console him.
I attended the inquest next day. A partner of some publishing firm
gave evidence that the deceased had brought him wood-pulp propositions,
and had been, he believed, an agent of an American business.
The jury found it a case of suicide while of unsound mind, and the few
effects were handed over to the American Consul to deal with. I gave
Scudder a full account of the affair, and it interested him greatly. He
said he wished he could have attended the inquest, for he reckoned it
would be about as spicy as to read one's own obituary notice.
The first two days he stayed with me in that back room he was
very peaceful. He read and smoked a bit, and made a heap of
jottings in a note-book, and every night we had a game of chess, at
which he beat me hollow. I think he was nursing his nerves back to
health, for he had had a pretty trying time. But on the third day I
could see he was beginning to get restless. He fixed up a list of the
days till June 15th, and ticked each off with a red pencil, making
remarks in shorthand against them. I would find him sunk in a
brown study, with his sharp eyes abstracted, and after those spells
of meditation he was apt to be very despondent.
Then I could see that he began to get edgy again. He listened for
little noises, and was always asking me if Paddock could be trusted.
Once or twice he got very peevish, and apologized for it. I didn't
blame him. I made every allowance, for he had taken on a fairly
stiff job.
It was not the safety of his own skin that troubled him, but the
success of the scheme he had planned. That little man was clean grit
all through, without a soft spot in him. One night he was very solemn.
'Say, Hannay,' he said, 'I judge I should let you a bit deeper into
this business. I should hate to go out without leaving somebody
else to put up a fight.' And he began to tell me in detail what I had
only heard from him vaguely.
I did not give him very close attention. The fact is, I was more
interested in his own adventures than in his high politics. I reckoned
that Karolides and his affairs were not my business, leaving all that to
him. So a lot that he said slipped clean out of my memory. I remember
that he was very clear that the danger to Karolides would not begin
till he had got to London, and would come from the very highest
quarters, where there would be no thought of suspicion. He mentioned
the name of a woman - Julia Czechenyi - as having something
to do with the danger. She would be the decoy, I gathered, to get
Karolides out of the care of his guards. He talked, too, about a Black
Stone and a man that lisped in his speech, and he described very
particularly somebody that he never referred to without a shudder -
an old man with a young voice who could hood his eyes like a hawk.
He spoke a good deal about death, too. He was mortally anxious
about winning through with his job, but he didn't care a rush for
his life.
'I reckon it's like going to sleep when you are pretty well tired
out, and waking to find a summer day with the scent of hay coming
in at the window. I used to thank God for such mornings way back
in the Blue-Grass country, and I guess I'll thank Him when I wake
up on the other side of Jordan.'
Next day he was much more cheerful, and read the life of Stonewall
Jackson much of the time. I went out to dinner with a mining
engineer I had got to see on business, and came back about half-past
ten in time for our game of chess before turning in.
I had a cigar in my mouth, I remember, as I pushed open the
smoking-room door. The lights were not lit, which struck me as
odd. I wondered if Scudder had turned in already.
I snapped the switch, but there was nobody there. Then I saw
something in the far corner which made me drop my cigar and fall
into a cold sweat.
My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife
through his heart which skewered him to the floor.
CHAPTER TWO
The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
I sat down in an armchair and felt very sick. That lasted for maybe
five minutes, and was succeeded by a fit of the horrors. The poor
staring white face on the floor was more than I could bear, and I
managed to get a table-cloth and cover it. Then I staggered to a
cupboard, found the brandy and swallowed several mouthfuls. I
had seen men die violently before; indeed I had killed a few myself
in the Matabele War; but this cold-blooded indoor business was
different. Still I managed to pull myself together. I looked at my
watch, and saw that it was half-past ten.
An idea seized me, and I went over the flat with a small-tooth
comb. There was nobody there, nor any trace of anybody, but I
shuttered and bolted all the windows and put the chain on the door.
By this time my wits were coming back to me, and I could think
again. It took me about an hour to figure the thing out, and I did
not hurry, for, unless the murderer came back, I had till about six
o'clock in the morning for my cogitations.
I was in the soup - that was pretty clear. Any shadow of a doubt
I might have had about the truth of Scudder's tale was now gone.
The proof of it was lying under the table-cloth. The men who
knew that he knew what he knew had found him, and had taken
the best way to make certain of his silence. Yes; but he had been in
my rooms four days, and his enemies must have reckoned that he
had confided in me. So I would be the next to go. It might be that
very night, or next day, or the day after, but my number was up
all right.
Then suddenly I thought of another probability. Supposing I
went out now and called in the police, or went to bed and let
Paddock find the body and call them in the morning. What kind of
a story was I to tell about Scudder? I had lied to Paddock about
him, and the whole thing looked desperately fishy. If I made a clean
breast of it and told the police everything he had told me, they
would simply laugh at me. The odds were a thousand to one that I
would be charged with the murder, and the circumstantial evidence
was strong enough to hang me. Few people knew me in England; I
had no real pal who could come forward and swear to my character.
Perhaps that was what those secret enemies were playing for. They
were clever enough for anything, and an English prison was as
good a way of getting rid of me till after June 15th as a knife in
my chest.
Besides, if I told the whole story, and by any miracle was believed,
I would be playing their game. Karolides would stay at home,
which was what they wanted. Somehow or other the sight of
Scudder's dead face had made me a passionate believer in his
scheme. He was gone, but he had taken me into his confidence, and
I was pretty well bound to carry on his work.
You may think this ridiculous for a man in danger of his life, but
that was the way I looked at it. I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not
braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed,
and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play
the game in his place.
It took me an hour or two to think this out, and by that time I
had come to a decision. I must vanish somehow, and keep vanished
till the end of the second week in June. Then I must somehow find
a way to get in touch with the Government people and tell them
what Scudder had told me. I wished to Heaven he had told me
more, and that I had listened more carefully to the little he had told
me. I knew nothing but the barest facts. There was a big risk that,
even if I weathered the other dangers, I would not be believed in
the end. I must take my chance of that, and hope that something
might happen which would confirm my tale in the eyes of the Government.
My first job was to keep going for the next three weeks. It was
now the 24th day of May, and that meant twenty days of hiding
before I could venture to approach the powers that be. I reckoned
that two sets of people would be looking for me - Scudder's
enemies to put me out of existence, and the police, who would
want me for Scudder's murder. It was going to be a giddy hunt,
and it was queer how the prospect comforted me. I had been slack
so long that almost any chance of activity was welcome. When I
had to sit alone with that corpse and wait on Fortune I was no
better than a crushed worm, but if my neck's safety was to hang on
my own wits I was prepared to be cheerful about it.
My next thought was whether Scudder had any papers about him
to give me a better clue to the business. I drew back the table-cloth
and searched his pockets, for I had no longer any shrinking from
the body. The face was wonderfully calm for a man who had been
struck down in a moment. There was nothing in the breast-pocket,
and only a few loose coins and a cigar-holder in the waistcoat. The
trousers held a little penknife and some silver, and the side pocket
of his jacket contained an old crocodile-skin cigar-case. There was
no sign of the little black book in which I had seen him making
notes. That had no doubt been taken by his murderer.
But as I looked up from my task I saw that some drawers had
been pulled out in the writing-table. Scudder would never have left
them in that state, for he was the tidiest of mortals. Someone must
have been searching for something - perhaps for the pocket-book.
I went round the flat and found that everything had been ransacked
- the inside of books, drawers, cupboards, boxes, even the
pockets of the clothes in my wardrobe, and the sideboard in the
dining-room. There was no trace of the book. Most likely the enemy
had found it, but they had not found it on Scudder's body.
Then I got out an atlas and looked at a big map of the British
Isles. My notion was to get off to some wild district, where my
veldcraft would be of some use to me, for I would be like a trapped
rat in a city. I considered that Scotland would be best, for my
people were Scotch and I could pass anywhere as an ordinary
Scotsman. I had half an idea at first to be a German tourist, for my
father had had German partners, and I had been brought up to
speak the tongue pretty fluently, not to mention having put in
three years prospecting for copper in German Damaraland. But I
calculated that it would be less conspicuous to be a Scot, and less in
a line with what the police might know of my past. I fixed on
Galloway as the best place to go. It was the nearest wild part of
Scotland, so far as I could figure it out, and from the look of the
map was not over thick with population.
A search in Bradshaw informed me that a train left St Pancras at
7.10, which would land me at any Galloway station in the late
afternoon. That was well enough, but a more important matter was
how I was to make my way to St Pancras, for I was pretty certain
that Scudder's friends would be watching outside. This puzzled me
for a bit; then I had an inspiration, on which I went to bed and
slept for two troubled hours.
I got up at four and opened my bedroom shutters. The faint
light of a fine summer morning was flooding the skies, and the
sparrows had begun to chatter. I had a great revulsion of feeling,
and felt a God-forgotten fool. My inclination was to let things
slide, and trust to the British police taking a reasonable view of my
case. But as I reviewed the situation I could find no arguments to
bring against my decision of the previous night, so with a wry
mouth I resolved to go on with my plan. I was not feeling in any
particular funk; only disinclined to go looking for trouble, if you
understand me.
I hunted out a well-used tweed suit, a pair of strong nailed boots,
and a flannel shirt with a collar. Into my pockets I stuffed a spare
shirt, a cloth cap, some handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush. I had
drawn a good sum in gold from the bank two days before, in case
Scudder should want money, and I took fifty pounds of it in
sovereigns in a belt which I had brought back from Rhodesia. That
was about all I wanted. Then I had a bath, and cut my moustache,
which was long and drooping, into a short stubbly fringe.
Now came the next step. Paddock used to arrive punctually at
7.30 and let himself in with a latch-key. But about twenty minutes
to seven, as I knew from bitter experience, the milkman turned up
with a great clatter of cans, and deposited my share outside my
door. I had seen that milkman sometimes when I had gone out for
an early ride. He was a young man about my own height, with an
ill-nourished moustache, and he wore a white overall. On him I
staked all my chances.
I went into the darkened smoking-room where the rays of morning
light were beginning to creep through the shutters. There I
breakfasted off a whisky-and-soda and some biscuits from the cupboard.
By this time it was getting on for six o'clock. I put a pipe in
My Pocket and filled my pouch from the tobacco jar on the table by
the fireplace.
As I poked into the tobacco my fingers touched something hard,
and I drew out Scudder's little black pocket-book ...
That seemed to me a good omen. I lifted the cloth from the body
and was amazed at the peace and dignity of the dead face. 'Goodbye,
old chap,' I said; 'I am going to do my best for you. Wish me
well, wherever you are.'
Then I hung about in the hall waiting for the milkman. That was
the worst part of the business, for I was fairly choking to get out of
doors. Six-thirty passed, then six-forty, but still he did not come.
The fool had chosen this day of all days to be late.
At one minute after the quarter to seven I heard the rattle of the
cans outside. I opened the front door, and there was my man,
singling out my cans from a bunch he carried and whistling through
his teeth. He jumped a bit at the sight of me.
'Come in here a moment,' I said. 'I want a word with you.' And
I led him into the dining-room.
'I reckon you're a bit of a sportsman,' I said, 'and I want you to
do me a service. Lend me your cap and overall for ten minutes, and
here's a sovereign for you.'
His eyes opened at the sight of the gold, and he grinned broadly.
'Wot's the gyme?'he asked.
'A bet,' I said. 'I haven't time to explain, but to win it I've got to
be a milkman for the next ten minutes. All you've got to do is to
stay here till I come back. You'll be a bit late, but nobody will
complain, and you'll have that quid for yourself.'
'Right-o!' he said cheerily. 'I ain't the man to spoil a bit of sport.
'Ere's the rig, guv'nor.'
I stuck on his flat blue hat and his white overall, picked up the
cans, banged my door, and went whistling downstairs. The porter
at the foot told me to shut my jaw, which sounded as if my make-up
was adequate.
At first I thought there was nobody in the street. Then I caught
sight of a policeman a hundred yards down, and a loafer shuffling
past on the other side. Some impulse made me raise my eyes to the
house opposite, and there at a first-floor window was a face. As the
loafer passed he looked up, and I fancied a signal was exchanged.
I crossed the street, whistling gaily and imitating the jaunty
swing of the milkman. Then I took the first side street, and went
up a left-hand turning which led past a bit of vacant ground. There
was no one in the little street, so I dropped the milk-cans inside the
hoarding and sent the cap and overall after them. I had only just
put on my cloth cap when a postman came round the corner. I gave
him good morning and he answered me unsuspiciously. At the
moment the clock of a neighbouring church struck the hour of seven.
There was not a second to spare. As soon as I got to Euston
Road I took to my heels and ran. The clock at Euston Station
showed five minutes past the hour. At St Pancras I had no time to
take a ticket, let alone that I had not settled upon my destination. A
porter told me the platform, and as I entered it I saw the train
already in motion. Two station officials blocked the way, but I
dodged them and clambered into the last carriage.
Three minutes later, as we were roaring through the northern
tunnels, an irate guard interviewed me. He wrote out for me a
ticket to Newton-Stewart, a name which had suddenly come back
to my memory, and he conducted me from the first-class compartment
where I had ensconced myself to a third-class smoker,
occupied by a sailor and a stout woman with a child. He went off
grumbling, and as I mopped my brow I observed to my companions
in my broadest Scots that it was a sore job catching trains. I had
already entered upon my part.
'The impidence o' that gyaird!' said the lady bitterly. 'He needit a
Scotch tongue to pit him in his place. He was complainin' o' this
wean no haein' a ticket and her no fower till August twalmonth,
and he was objectin' to this gentleman spittin'.'
The sailor morosely agreed, and I started my new life in an
atmosphere of protest against authority. I reminded myself that a
week ago I had been finding the world dull.
CHAPTER THREE
The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
I had a solemn time travelling north that day. It was fine May
weather, with the hawthorn flowering on every hedge, and I asked
myself why, when I was still a free man, I had stayed on in London
and not got the good of this heavenly country. I didn't dare face
the restaurant car, but I got a luncheon-basket at Leeds and shared
it with the fat woman. Also I got the morning's papers, with news
about starters for the Derby and the beginning of the cricket season,
and some paragraphs about how Balkan affairs were settling down
and a British squadron was going to Kiel.
When I had done with them I got out Scudder's little black
pocket-book and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings,
chiefly figures, though now and then a name was printed in. For
example, I found the words 'Hofgaard', 'Luneville', and 'Avocado'
pretty often, and especially the word 'Pavia'.
Now I was certain that Scudder never did anything without a
reason, and I was pretty sure that there was a cypher in all this.
That is a subject which has always interested me, and I did a bit
at it myself once as intelligence officer at Delagoa Bay during the
Boer War. I have a head for things like chess and puzzles, and I
used to reckon myself pretty good at finding out cyphers. This one
looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to
the letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the
clue to that sort after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think
Scudder would have been content with anything so easy. So I
fastened on the printed words, for you can make a pretty good
numerical cypher if you have a key word which gives you the
sequence of the letters.
I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell
asleep and woke at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into
the slow Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose
looks I didn't like, but he never glanced at me, and when I caught
sight of myself in the mirror of an automatic machine I didn't
wonder. With my brown face, my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was
the very model of one of the hill farmers who were crowding into
the third-class carriages.
I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay
pipes. They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths
were full of prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone
up the Cairn and the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters.
Above half the men had lunched heavily and were highly flavoured
with whisky, but they took no notice of me. We rumbled slowly
into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great wide moorland
place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills showing northwards.
About five o'clock the carriage had emptied, and I was left alone
as I had hoped. I got out at the next station, a little place whose
name I scarcely noted, set right in the heart of a bog. It reminded
me of one of those forgotten little stations in the Karroo. An old
station-master was digging in his garden, and with his spade over
his shoulder sauntered to the train, took charge of a parcel, and
went back to his potatoes. A child of ten received my ticket, and I
emerged on a white road that straggled over the brown moor.
It was a gorgeous spring evening, with every hill showing as
clear as a cut amethyst. The air had the queer, rooty smell of bogs,
but it was as fresh as mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on
my spirits. I actually felt light-hearted. I might have been a boy out
for a spring holiday tramp, instead of a man of thirty-seven very
much wanted by the police. I felt just as I used to feel when I was
starting for a big trek on a frosty morning on the high veld. If you
believe me, I swung along that road whistling. There was no plan
of campaign in my head, only just to go on and on in this blessed,
honest-smelling hill country, for every mile put me in better humour
with myself.
In a roadside planting I cut a walking-stick of hazel, and presently
struck off the highway up a bypath which followed the glen of a
brawling stream. I reckoned that I was still far ahead of any pursuit,
and for that night might please myself. It was some hours since I
had tasted food, and I was getting very hungry when I came to a
herd's cottage set in a nook beside a waterfall. A brown-faced
woman was standing by the door, and greeted me with the kindly
shyness of moorland places. When I asked for a night's lodging she
said I was welcome to the 'bed in the loft', and very soon she set
before me a hearty meal of ham and eggs, scones, and thick sweet milk.
At the darkening her man came in from the hills, a lean giant,
who in one step covered as much ground as three paces of ordinary
mortals. They asked me no questions, for they had the perfect
breeding of all dwellers in the wilds, but I could see they set me
down as a kind of dealer, and I took some trouble to confirm their
view. I spoke a lot about cattle, of which my host knew little, and I
picked up from him a good deal about the local Galloway markets,
which I tucked away in my memory for future use. At ten I was
nodding in my chair, and the 'bed in the loft' received a weary man
who never opened his eyes till five o'clock set the little homestead
a-going once more.
They refused any payment, and by six I had breakfasted and was
striding southwards again. My notion was to return to the railway
line a station or two farther on than the place where I had alighted
yesterday and to double back. I reckoned that that was the safest
way, for the police would naturally assume that I was always making
farther from London in the direction of some western port. I
thought I had still a good bit of a start, for, as I reasoned, it would
take some hours to fix the blame on me, and several more to
identify the fellow who got on board the train at St Pancras.
it was the same jolly, clear spring weather, and I simply could
not contrive to feel careworn. Indeed I was in better spirits than I
had been for months. Over a long ridge of moorland I took my
road, skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called
Cairnsmore of Fleet. Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere,
and the links of green pasture by the streams were dotted
with young lambs. All the slackness of the past months was slipping
from my bones, and I stepped out like a four-year-old. By-and-by I
came to a swell of moorland which dipped to the vale of a little
river, and a mile away in the heather I saw the smoke of a train.
The station, when I reached it, proved to be ideal for my purpose.
The moor surged up around it and left room only for the single
line, the slender siding, a waiting-room, an office, the station-
master's cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william.
There seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the
desolation the waves of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach
half a mile away. I waited in the deep heather till I saw the smoke
of an east-going train on the horizon. Then I approached the tiny
booking-office and took a ticket for Dumfries.
The only occupants of the carriage were an old shepherd and his
dog - a wall-eyed brute that I mistrusted. The man was asleep, and
on the cushions beside him was that morning's SCOTSMAN. Eagerly I
seized on it, for I fancied it would tell me something.
There were two columns about the Portland Place Murder, as it
was called. My man Paddock had given the alarm and had the milkman
arrested. Poor devil, it looked as if the latter had earned his
sovereign hardly; but for me he had been cheap at the price, for he
seemed to have occupied the police for the better part of the day. In
the latest news I found a further instalment of the story. The milkman
had been released, I read, and the true criminal, about whose identity
the police were reticent, was believed to have got away from London
by one of the northern lines. There was a short note about me as the
owner of the flat. I guessed the police had stuck that in, as a clumsy
contrivance to persuade me that I was unsuspected.
There was nothing else in the paper, nothing about foreign
politics or Karolides, or the things that had interested Scudder. I
laid it down, and found that we were approaching the station at
which I had got out yesterday. The potato-digging station-master
had been gingered up into some activity, for the west-going train
was waiting to let us pass, and from it had descended three men
who were asking him questions. I supposed that they were the local
police, who had been stirred up by Scotland Yard, and had traced
me as far as this one-horse siding. Sitting well back in the shadow I
watched them carefully. One of them had a book, and took down
notes. The old potato-digger seemed to have turned peevish, but
the child who had collected my ticket was talking volubly. All the
party looked out across the moor where the white road departed. I
hoped they were going to take up my tracks there.
As we moved away from that station my companion woke up.
He fixed me with a wandering glance, kicked his dog viciously, and
inquired where he was. Clearly he was very drunk.
'That's what comes o' bein' a teetotaller,' he observed in bitter
regret.
I expressed my surprise that in him I should have met a blue-
ribbon stalwart.
'Ay, but I'm a strong teetotaller,' he said pugnaciously. 'I took
the pledge last Martinmas, and I havena touched a drop o' whisky
sinsyne. Not even at Hogmanay, though I was sair temptit.'
He swung his heels up on the seat, and burrowed a frowsy head
into the cushions.
'And that's a' I get,' he moaned. 'A heid hetter than hell fire, and
twae een lookin' different ways for the Sabbath.'
'What did it?' I asked.
'A drink they ca' brandy. Bein' a teetotaller I keepit off the
whisky, but I was nip-nippin' a' day at this brandy, and I doubt I'll
no be weel for a fortnicht.' His voice died away into a splutter, and
sleep once more laid its heavy hand on him.
My plan had been to get out at some station down the line, but
the train suddenly gave me a better chance, for it came to a standstill
at the end of a culvert which spanned a brawling porter-coloured
river. I looked out and saw that every carriage window was closed
and no human figure appeared in the landscape. So I opened the
door, and dropped quickly into the tangle of hazels which edged
the line.
it would have been all right but for that infernal dog. Under the
impression that I was decamping with its master's belongings, it
started to bark, and all but got me by the trousers. This woke up
the herd, who stood bawling at the carriage door in the belief that I
had committed suicide. I crawled through the thicket, reached the
edge of the stream, and in cover of the bushes put a hundred yards
or so behind me. Then from my shelter I peered back, and saw the
guard and several passengers gathered round the open carriage
door and staring in my direction. I could not have made a more
public departure if I had left with a bugler and a brass band.
Happily the drunken herd provided a diversion. He and his dog,
which was attached by a rope to his waist, suddenly cascaded out of
the carriage, landed on their heads on the track, and rolled some
way down the bank towards the water. In the rescue which followed
the dog bit somebody, for I could hear the sound of hard swearing.
Presently they had forgotten me, and when after a quarter of a
mile's crawl I ventured to look back, the train had started again and
was vanishing in the cutting.
I was in a wide semicircle of moorland, with the brown river as
radius, and the high hills forming the northern circumference. There
was not a sign or sound of a human being, only the plashing water
and the interminable crying of curlews. Yet, oddly enough, for the
first time I felt the terror of the hunted on me. It was not the police
that I thought of, but the other folk, who knew that I knew
Scudder's secret and dared not let me live. I was certain that they
would pursue me with a keenness and vigilance unknown to the
British law, and that once their grip closed on me I should find
no mercy.
I looked back, but there was nothing in the landscape. The sun
glinted on the metals of the line and the wet stones in the stream,
and you could not have found a more peaceful sight in the world.
Nevertheless I started to run. Crouching low in the runnels of the
bog, I ran till the sweat blinded my eyes. The mood did not leave
me till I had reached the rim of mountain and flung myself panting
on a ridge high above the young waters of the brown river.
From my vantage-ground I could scan the whole moor right
away to the railway line and to the south of it where green fields
took the place of heather. I have eyes like a hawk, but I could see
nothing moving in the whole countryside. Then I looked east
beyond the ridge and saw a new kind of landscape - shallow green
valleys with plentiful fir plantations and the faint lines of dust
which spoke of highroads. Last of all I looked into the blue May
sky, and there I saw that which set my pulses racing ...
Low down in the south a monoplane was climbing into the
heavens. I was as certain as if I had been told that that aeroplane
was looking for me, and that it did not belong to the police. For an
hour or two I watched it from a pit of heather. It flew low along
the hill-tops, and then in narrow circles over the valley up which I
had come' Then it seemed to change its mind, rose to a great
height, and flew away back to the south.
I did not like this espionage from the air, and I began to think
less well of the countryside I had chosen for a refuge. These
heather hills were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky,
and I must find a different kind of sanctuary. I looked with more
satisfaction to the green country beyond the ridge, for there I
should find woods and stone houses.
About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white
ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland
stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became
a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a
solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a
bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man.
He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with
spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger
marking the place. Slowly he repeated -
As when a Gryphon through the wilderness
With winged step, o'er hill and moory dale
Pursues the Arimaspian.
He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a
pleasant sunburnt boyish face.
'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for
the road.'
The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me
from the house.
'Is that place an inn?' I asked.
'At your service,' he said politely. 'I am the landlord, Sir, and I
hope you will stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have had no
company for a week.'
I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my
pipe. I began to detect an ally.
'You're young to be an innkeeper,' I said.
'My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there
with my grandmother. It's a slow job for a young man, and it
wasn't my choice of profession.'
'Which was?'
He actually blushed. 'I want to write books,' he said.
'And what better chance could you ask?' I cried. 'Man, I've often
thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in the world.'
'Not now,' he said eagerly. 'Maybe in the old days when you had
pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on
the road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of
fat women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the
spring, and the shooting tenants in August. There is not much
material to be got out of that. I want to see life, to travel the world,
and write things like Kipling and Conrad. But the most I've done
yet is to get some verses printed in CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL.'
I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the
brown hills.
'I've knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn't despise such
a hermitage. D'you think that adventure is found only in the tropics
or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you're rubbing shoulders
with it at this moment.'
'That's what Kipling says,' he said, his eyes brightening, and he
quoted some verse about 'Romance bringing up the 9.15'.
'Here's a true tale for you then,' I cried, 'and a month from now
you can make a novel out of it.'
Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a
lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the
minor details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley,
who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang.
They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and
were now on my tracks.
I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn't. I pictured a
flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching
days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my
life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the
Portland Place murder. 'You're looking for adventure,' I cried;
'well, you've found it here. The devils are after me, and the police
are after them. It's a race that I mean to win.'
'By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all
pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.'
'You believe me,' I said gratefully.
'Of course I do,' and he held out his hand. 'I believe everything
out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.'
He was very young, but he was the man for my money.
'I think they're off my track for the moment, but I must lie close
for a couple of days. Can you take me in?'
He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the
house. 'You can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I'll
see that nobody blabs, either. And you'll give me some more
material about your adventures?'
As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an
engine. There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend,
the monoplane.
He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook
over the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was
stacked with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw the
grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called
Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at
all hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him.
He had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily
paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I
told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange
figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and
aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder's note-book.
He came back at midday with the SCOTSMAN. There was nothing in
it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a
repetition of yesterday's statement that the murderer had gone
North. But there was a long article, reprinted from THE TIMES, about
Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no
mention of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the
afternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search for the cypher.
As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elaborate
system of experiments I had pretty well discovered what were the
nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word, and when I thought
of the odd million words he might have used I felt pretty hopeless.
But about three o'clock I had a sudden inspiration.
The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder
had said it was the key to the Karolides business, and it occurred to
me to try it on his cypher.
It worked. The five letters of 'Julia' gave me the position of the
vowels. A was J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so represented
by X in the cypher. E was XXI, and so on. 'Czechenyi' gave
me the numerals for the principal consonants. I scribbled that
scheme on a bit of paper and sat down to read Scudder's pages.
In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers that
drummed on the table.
I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming
up the glen towards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was
the sound of people alighting. There seemed to be two of them,
men in aquascutums and tweed caps.
Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes
bright with excitement.
'There's two chaps below looking for you,' he whispered.
'They're in the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked
about you and said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they
described you jolly well, down to your boots and shirt. I told them
you had been here last night and had gone off on a motor bicycle
this morning, and one of the chaps swore like a navvy.'
I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed
thin fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and
lisped in his talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my
young friend was positive.
I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they
were part of a letter -
... 'Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he could not
act for a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now, especially
as Karolides is uncertain about his plans. But if Mr T. advises
I will do the best I ...'
I manufactured it rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page
of a private letter.
'Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask
them to return it to me if they overtake me.'
Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping
from behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was
slim, the other was sleek; that was the most I could make of my
reconnaissance.
The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. 'Your paper woke
them up,' he said gleefully. 'The dark fellow went as white as death
and cursed like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly.
They paid for their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn't wait
for change.'
'Now I'll tell you what I want you to do,' I said. 'Get on your
bicycle and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe
the two men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do
with the London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back,
never fear. Not tonight, for they'll follow me forty miles along the
road, but first thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here
bright and early.'
He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder's notes.
When he came back we dined together, and in common decency I
had to let him pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts
and the Matabele War, thinking all the while what tame businesses
these were compared to this I was now engaged in! When he went
to bed I sat up and finished Scudder. I smoked in a chair till
daylight, for I could not sleep.
About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two
constables and a sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the
innkeeper's instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes
later I saw from my window a second car come across the plateau
from the opposite direction. It did not come up to the inn, but
stopped two hundred yards off in the shelter of a patch of wood. I
noticed that its occupants carefully reversed it before leaving it. A
minute or two later I heard their steps on the gravel outside the window.
My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what
happened. I had a notion that, if I could bring the police and my
other more dangerous pursuers together, something might work
out of it to my advantage. But now I had a better idea. I scribbled a
line of thanks to my host, opened the window, and dropped quietly
into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled
down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far
side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span
in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a
long journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur's seat, and
stole gently out on to the plateau.
Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn,
but the wind seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
You may picture me driving that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth
over the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing
back at first over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to the next
turning; then driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to
keep on the highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had
found in Scudder's pocket-book.
The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the
Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference
were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you
shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and
had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale,
and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.
Why, I don't know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if
you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The
fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger
destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame
Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone
hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me
something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so
immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all
for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was
chiefly greedy about.
The whole story was in the notes - with gaps, you understand,
which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down
his authorities, too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a
numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the
reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed
were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out
of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three.
The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book - these,
and one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside
brackets. '(Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of
use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17
p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.
The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing
a war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged,
said Scudder, ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be
the occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his
checks on June 14th, two weeks and four days from that May
morning. I gathered from Scudder's notes that nothing on earth
could prevent that. His talk of Epirote guards that would skin their
own grandmothers was all billy-o.
The second thing was that this war was going to come as a
mighty surprise to Britain. Karolides' death would set the Balkans
by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum.
Russia wouldn't like that, and there would be high words. But
Berlin would play the peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till
suddenly she would find a good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and
in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a pretty good one
too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark. While
we were talking about the goodwill and good intentions of Germany
our coast would be silently ringed with mines, and submarines
would be waiting for every battleship.
But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to
happen on June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn't
once happened to meet a French staff officer, coming back from
West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in
spite of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real
working alliance between France and Britain, and that the two
General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint
action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming
over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a
statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on mobilization.
At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow, it was
something uncommonly important.
But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London -
others, at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call
them collectively the 'Black Stone'. They represented not our Allies,
but our deadly foes; and the information, destined for France, was
to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember -
used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes,
suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.
This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a
country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that
hummed in my brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.
My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister,
but a little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who
would believe my tale? I must show a sign, some token in proof,
and Heaven knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep going
myself, ready to act when things got riper, and that was going to be
no light job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me
and the watchers of the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on
my trail.
I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by
the sun, for I remembered from the map that if I went north I
would come into a region of coalpits and industrial towns. Presently
I was down from the moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of
a river. For miles I ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of the
trees I saw a great castle. I swung through little old thatched
villages, and over peaceful lowland streams, and past gardens blazing
with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was so deep in
peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were
those who sought my life; ay, and that in a month's time, unless I
had the almightiest of luck, these round country faces would be
pinched and staring, and men would be lying dead in English fields.
About mid-day I entered a long straggling village, and had a
mind to stop and eat. Half-way down was the Post Office, and on
the steps of it stood the postmistress and a policeman hard at work
conning a telegram. When they saw me they wakened up, and the
policeman advanced with raised hand, and cried on me to stop.
I nearly was fool enough to obey. Then it flashed upon me that
the wire had to do with me; that my friends at the inn had come to an
understanding, and were united in desiring to see more of me, and
that it had been easy enough for them to wire the description of me
and the car to thirty villages through which I might pass. I released
the brakes just in time. As it was, the policeman made a claw at the
hood, and only dropped off when he got my left in his eye.
I saw that main roads were no place for me, and turned into the
byways. It wasn't an easy job without a map, for there was the risk
of getting on to a farm road and ending in a duck-pond or a stable-
yard, and I couldn't afford that kind of delay. I began to see what
an ass I had been to steal the car. The big green brute would be the
safest kind of clue to me over the breadth of Scotland. If I left it
and took to my feet, it would be discovered in an hour or two and
I would get no start in the race.
The immediate thing to do was to get to the loneliest roads.
These I soon found when I struck up a tributary of the big river,
and got into a glen with steep hills all about me, and a corkscrew
road at the end which climbed over a pass. Here I met nobody, but
it was taking me too far north, so I slewed east along a bad track
and finally struck a big double-line railway. Away below me I saw
another broadish valley, and it occurred to me that if I crossed it I
might find some remote inn to pass the night. The evening was now
drawing in, and I was furiously hungry, for I had eaten nothing since
breakfast except a couple of buns I had bought from a baker's cart.
just then I heard a noise in the sky, and lo and behold there was
that infernal aeroplane, flying low, about a dozen miles to the south
and rapidly coming towards me.
I had the sense to remember that on a bare moor I was at the
aeroplane's mercy, and that my only chance was to get to the leafy
cover of the valley. Down the hill I went like blue lightning,
screwing my head round, whenever I dared, to watch that damned
flying machine. Soon I was on a road between hedges, and dipping
to the deep-cut glen of a stream. Then came a bit of thick wood
where I slackened speed.
Suddenly on my left I heard the hoot of another car, and realized
to my horror that I was almost up on a couple of gate-posts through
which a private road debouched on the highway. My horn gave an
agonized roar, but it was too late. I clapped on my brakes, but my
impetus was too great, and there before me a car was sliding
athwart my course. In a second there would have been the deuce of
a wreck. I did the only thing possible, and ran slap into the hedge
on the right, trusting to find something soft beyond.
But there I was mistaken. My car slithered through the hedge
like butter, and then gave a sickening plunge forward. I saw what
was coming, leapt on the seat and would have jumped out. But a
branch of hawthorn got me in the chest, lifted me up and held me,
while a ton or two of expensive metal slipped below me, bucked
and pitched, and then dropped with an almighty smash fifty feet to
the bed of the stream.
Slowly that thorn let me go. I subsided first on the hedge, and then
very gently on a bower of nettles. As I scrambled to my feet a hand
took me by the arm, and a sympathetic and badly scared voice
asked me if I were hurt.
I found myself looking at a tall young man in goggles and a
leather ulster, who kept on blessing his soul and whinnying
apologies. For myself, once I got my wind back, I was rather glad
than otherwise. This was one way of getting rid of the car.
'My blame, Sir,' I answered him. 'It's lucky that I did not add
homicide to my follies. That's the end of my Scotch motor tour,
but it might have been the end of my life.'
He plucked out a watch and studied it. 'You're the right sort of
fellow,' he said. 'I can spare a quarter of an hour, and my house is
two minutes off. I'll see you clothed and fed and snug in bed.
Where's your kit, by the way? Is it in the burn along with the car?'
'It's in my pocket,' I said, brandishing a toothbrush. 'I'm a
Colonial and travel light.'
'A Colonial,' he cried. 'By Gad, you're the very man I've been
praying for. Are you by any blessed chance a Free Trader?'
'I am,' said I, without the foggiest notion of what he meant.
He patted my shoulder and hurried me into his car. Three minutes
later we drew up before a comfortable-looking shooting box set
among pine-trees, and he ushered me indoors. He took me first to a
bedroom and flung half a dozen of his suits before me, for my own
had been pretty well reduced to rags. I selected a loose blue serge,
which differed most conspicuously from my former garments, and
borrowed a linen collar. Then he haled me to the dining-room,
where the remnants of a meal stood on the table, and announced
that I had just five minutes to feed. 'You can take a snack in your
pocket, and we'll have supper when we get back. I've got to be at
the Masonic Hall at eight o'clock, or my agent will comb my hair.'
I had a cup of coffee and some cold ham, while he yarned away
on the hearth-rug.
'You find me in the deuce of a mess, Mr - by-the-by, you
haven't told me your name. Twisdon? Any relation of old Tommy
Twisdon of the Sixtieth? No? Well, you see I'm Liberal Candidate
for this part of the world, and I had a meeting on tonight at
Brattleburn - that's my chief town, and an infernal Tory stronghold.
I had got the Colonial ex-Premier fellow, Crumpleton, coming to
speak for me tonight, and had the thing tremendously billed and
the whole place ground-baited. This afternoon I had a wire from
the ruffian saying he had got influenza at Blackpool, and here am I
left to do the whole thing myself. I had meant to speak for ten
minutes and must now go on for forty, and, though I've been
racking my brains for three hours to think of something, I simply
cannot last the course. Now you've got to be a good chap and help
me. You're a Free Trader and can tell our people what a wash-out
Protection is in the Colonies. All you fellows have the gift of the
gab - I wish to Heaven I had it. I'll be for evermore in your debt.'
I had very few notions about Free Trade one way or the other,
but I saw no other chance to get what I wanted. My young gentleman
was far too absorbed in his own difficulties to think how odd
it was to ask a stranger who had just missed death by an ace and
had lost a 1,000-guinea car to address a meeting for him on the spur
of the moment. But my necessities did not allow me to contemplate
oddnesses or to pick and choose my supports.
'All right,' I said. 'I'm not much good as a speaker, but I'll tell
them a bit about Australia.'
At my words the cares of the ages slipped from his shoulders,
and he was rapturous in his thanks. He lent me a big driving coat -
and never troubled to ask why I had started on a motor tour
without possessing an ulster - and, as we slipped down the dusty
roads, poured into my ears the simple facts of his history. He was
an orphan, and his uncle had brought him up - I've forgotten the
uncle's name, but he was in the Cabinet, and you can read his
speeches in the papers. He had gone round the world after leaving
Cambridge, and then, being short of a job, his uncle had advised
politics. I gathered that he had no preference in parties. 'Good
chaps in both,' he said cheerfully, 'and plenty of blighters, too. I'm
Liberal, because my family have always been Whigs.' But if he was
lukewarm politically he had strong views on other things. He
found out I knew a bit about horses, and jawed away about the
Derby entries; and he was full of plans for improving his shooting.
Altogether, a very clean, decent, callow young man.
As we passed through a little town two policemen signalled us to
stop, and flashed their lanterns on us.
'Beg pardon, Sir Harry,' said one. 'We've got instructions to
look out for a car, and the description's no unlike yours.'
'Right-o,' said my host, while I thanked Providence for the
devious ways I had been brought to safety. After that he spoke no
more, for his mind began to labour heavily with his coming speech.
His lips kept muttering, his eye wandered, and I began to prepare
myself for a second catastrophe. I tried to think of something to say
myself, but my mind was dry as a stone. The next thing I knew we
had drawn up outside a door in a street, and were being welcomed
by some noisy gentlemen with rosettes.
The hall had about five hundred in it, women mostly, a lot of
bald heads, and a dozen or two young men. The chairman, a
weaselly minister with a reddish nose, lamented Crumpleton's absence,
soliloquized on his influenza, and gave me a certificate as a
'trusted leader of Australian thought'. There were two policemen at
the door, and I hoped they took note of that testimonial. Then Sir
Harry started.
I never heard anything like it. He didn't begin to know how to
talk. He had about a bushel of notes from which he read, and when
he let go of them he fell into one prolonged stutter. Every now and
then he remembered a phrase he had learned by heart, straightened
his back, and gave it off like Henry Irving, and the next moment he
was bent double and crooning over his papers. It was the most
appalling rot, too. He talked about the 'German menace', and said
it was all a Tory invention to cheat the poor of their rights and
keep back the great flood of social reform, but that 'organized
labour' realized this and laughed the Tories to scorn. He was all for
reducing our Navy as a proof of our good faith, and then sending
Germany an ultimatum telling her to do the same or we would
knock her into a cocked hat. He said that, but for the Tories,
Germany and Britain would be fellow-workers in peace and reform.
I thought of the little black book in my pocket! A giddy lot Scudder's
friends cared for peace and reform.
Yet in a queer way I liked the speech. You could see the niceness
of the chap shining out behind the muck with which he had been
spoon-fed. Also it took a load off my mind. I mightn't be much of
an orator, but I was a thousand per cent better than Sir Harry.
I didn't get on so badly when it came to my turn. I simply told
them all I could remember about Australia, praying there should be
no Australian there - all about its labour party and emigration and
universal service. I doubt if I remembered to mention Free Trade,
but I said there were no Tories in Australia, only Labour and
Liberals. That fetched a cheer, and I woke them up a bit when I
started in to tell them the kind of glorious business I thought could
be made out of the Empire if we really put our backs into it.
Altogether I fancy I was rather a success. The minister didn't like
me, though, and when he proposed a vote of thanks, spoke of Sir
Harry's speech as 'statesmanlike' and mine as having 'the eloquence
of an emigration agent'.
When we were in the car again my host was in wild spirits at
having got his job over. 'A ripping speech, Twisdon,' he said.
'Now, you're coming home with me. I'm all alone, and if you'll
stop a day or two I'll show you some very decent fishing.'
We had a hot supper - and I wanted it pretty badly - and then
drank grog in a big cheery smoking-room with a crackling wood
fire. I thought the time had come for me to put my cards on the
table. I saw by this man's eye that he was the kind you can trust.
'Listen, Sir Harry,' I said. 'I've something pretty important to
say to you. You're a good fellow, and I'm going to be frank.
Where on earth did you get that poisonous rubbish you talked tonight?'
His face fell. 'Was it as bad as that?' he asked ruefully. 'It did
sound rather thin. I got most of it out of the PROGRESSIVE MAGAZINE
and pamphlets that agent chap of mine keeps sending me. But you
surely don't think Germany would ever go to war with us?'
'Ask that question in six weeks and it won't need an answer,' I
said. 'If you'll give me your attention for half an hour I am going
to tell you a story.'
I can see yet that bright room with the deers' heads and the old
prints on the walls, Sir Harry standing restlessly on the stone curb
of the hearth, and myself lying back in an armchair, speaking. I
seemed to be another person, standing aside and listening to my
own voice, and judging carefully the reliability of my tale. It was
the first time I had ever told anyone the exact truth, so far as I
understood it, and it did me no end of good, for it straightened out
the thing in my own mind. I blinked no detail. He heard all about
Scudder, and the milkman, and the note-book, and my doings in
Galloway. Presently he got very excited and walked up and down
the hearth-rug.
'So you see,' I concluded, 'you have got here in your house the
man that is wanted for the Portland Place murder. Your duty is to
send your car for the police and give me up. I don't think I'll get
very far. There'll be an accident, and I'll have a knife in my ribs an
hour or so after arrest. Nevertheless, it's your duty, as a law-abiding
citizen. Perhaps in a month's time you'll be sorry, but you have no
cause to think of that.'
He was looking at me with bright steady eyes. 'What was your
job in Rhodesia, Mr Hannay?' he asked.
'Mining engineer,' I said. 'I've made my pile cleanly and I've had
a good time in the making of it.'
'Not a profession that weakens the nerves, is it?'
I laughed. 'Oh, as to that, my nerves are good enough.' I took
down a hunting-knife from a stand on the wall, and did the old
Mashona trick of tossing it and catching it in my lips. That wants a
pretty steady heart.
He watched me with a smile. 'I don't want proof. I may be an ass
on the platform, but I can size up a man. You're no murderer and
you're no fool, and I believe you are speaking the truth. I'm going
to back you up. Now, what can I do?'
'First, I want you to write a letter to your uncle. I've got to get
in touch with the Government people sometime before the 15th of June.'
He pulled his moustache. 'That won't help you. This is Foreign
Office business, and my uncle would have nothing to do with it.
Besides, you'd never convince him. No, I'll go one better. I'll write
to the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. He's my godfather,
and one of the best going. What do you want?'
He sat down at a table and wrote to my dictation. The gist of it
was that if a man called Twisdon (I thought I had better stick to
that name) turned up before June 15th he was to entreat him
kindly. He said Twisdon would prove his bona fides by passing the
word 'Black Stone' and whistling 'Annie Laurie'.
'Good,' said Sir Harry. 'That's the proper style. By the way,
you'll find my godfather - his name's Sir Walter Bullivant - down
at his country cottage for Whitsuntide. It's close to Artinswell on
the Kenner. That's done. Now, what's the next thing?'
'You're about my height. Lend me the oldest tweed suit you've
got. Anything will do, so long as the colour is the opposite of the
clothes I destroyed this afternoon. Then show me a map of the
neighbourhood and explain to me the lie of the land. Lastly, if
the police come seeking me, just show them the car in the glen. If
the other lot turn up, tell them I caught the south express after your
meeting.'
He did, or promised to do, all these things. I shaved off the
remnants of my moustache, and got inside an ancient suit of what I
believe is called heather mixture. The map gave me some notion of
my whereabouts, and told me the two things I wanted to know -
where the main railway to the south could be joined and what were
the wildest districts near at hand.
At two o'clock he wakened me from my slumbers in the
smoking-room armchair, and led me blinking into the dark starry
night. An old bicycle was found in a tool-shed and handed over to me.
'First turn to the right up by the long fir-wood,' he enjoined. 'By
daybreak you'll be well into the hills. Then I should pitch the
machine into a bog and take to the moors on foot. You can put in a
week among the shepherds, and be as safe as if you were in New
Guinea.'
I pedalled diligently up steep roads of hill gravel till the skies
grew pale with morning. As the mists cleared before the sun, I
found myself in a wide green world with glens falling on every side
and a far-away blue horizon. Here, at any rate, I could get early
news of my enemies.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
I sat down on the very crest of the pass and took stock of my position.
Behind me was the road climbing through a long cleft in the
hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was
a flat space of maybe a mile, all pitted with bog-holes and rough
with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another
glen to a plain whose blue dimness melted into the distance. To left
and right were round-shouldered green hills as smooth as pancakes,
but to the south - that is, the left hand - there was a glimpse of
high heathery mountains, which I remembered from the map as the
big knot of hill which I had chosen for my sanctuary. I was on the
central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything
moving for miles. In the meadows below the road half a mile back
a cottage smoked, but it was the only sign of human life. Otherwise
there was only the calling of plovers and the tinkling of little streams.
It was now about seven o'clock, and as I waited I heard once
again that ominous beat in the air. Then I realized that my vantage-
ground might be in reality a trap. There was no cover for a tomtit
in those bald green places.
I sat quite still and hopeless while the beat grew louder. Then I
saw an aeroplane coming up from the east. It was flying high, but
as I looked it dropped several hundred feet and began to circle
round the knot of hill in narrowing circles, just as a hawk wheels
before it pounces. Now it was flying very low, and now the observer
on board caught sight of me. I could see one of the two occupants
examining me through glasses.
Suddenly it began to rise in swift whorls, and the next I knew
it was speeding eastward again till it became a speck in the
blue morning.
That made me do some savage thinking. My enemies had located
me, and the next thing would be a cordon round me. I didn't know
what force they could command, but I was certain it would be
sufficient. The aeroplane had seen my bicycle, and would conclude
that I would try to escape by the road. In that case there might be a
chance on the moors to the right or left. I wheeled the machine a
hundred yards from the highway, and plunged it into a moss-hole,
where it sank among pond-weed and water-buttercups. Then I
climbed to a knoll which gave me a view of the two valleys.
Nothing was stirring on the long white ribbon that threaded them.
I have said there was not cover in the whole place to hide a rat.
As the day advanced it was flooded with soft fresh light till it had
the fragrant sunniness of the South African veld. At other times I
would have liked the place, but now it seemed to suffocate me. The
free moorlands were prison walls, and the keen hill air was the
breath of a dungeon.
I tossed a coin - heads right, tails left - and it fell heads, so I
turned to the north. In a little I came to the brow of the ridge
which was the containing wall of the pass. I saw the highroad for
maybe ten miles, and far down it something that was moving, and
that I took to be a motor-car. Beyond the ridge I looked on a
rolling green moor, which fell away into wooded glens.
Now my life on the veld has given me the eyes of a kite, and I
can see things for which most men need a telescope ... Away
down the slope, a couple of miles away, several men were advancing.
like a row of beaters at a shoot ...
I dropped out of sight behind the sky-line. That way was shut to
me, and I must try the bigger hills to the south beyond the highway.
The car I had noticed was getting nearer, but it was still a long way
off with some very steep gradients before it. I ran hard, crouching
low except in the hollows, and as I ran I kept scanning the brow of
the hill before me. Was it imagination, or did I see figures - one,
two, perhaps more - moving in a glen beyond the stream?
If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land there is only
one chance of escape. You must stay in the patch, and let your
enemies search it and not find you. That was good sense, but how
on earth was I to escape notice in that table-cloth of a place? I
would have buried myself to the neck in mud or lain below water
or climbed the tallest tree. But there was not a stick of wood, the
bog-holes were little puddles, the stream was a slender trickle. There
was nothing but short heather, and bare hill bent, and the white highway.
Then in a tiny bight of road, beside a heap of stones, I found
the roadman.
He had just arrived, and was wearily flinging down his hammer.
He looked at me with a fishy eye and yawned.
'Confoond the day I ever left the herdin'!' he said, as if to the
world at large. 'There I was my ain maister. Now I'm a slave to the
Goavernment, tethered to the roadside, wi' sair een, and a back like
a suckle.'
He took up the hammer, struck a stone, dropped the implement
with an oath, and put both hands to his ears. 'Mercy on me! My
heid's burstin'!' he cried.
He was a wild figure, about my own size but much bent, with a
week's beard on his chin, and a pair of big horn spectacles.
'I canna dae't,' he cried again. 'The Surveyor maun just report
me. I'm for my bed.'
I asked him what was the trouble, though indeed that was
clear enough.
'The trouble is that I'm no sober. Last nicht my dochter Merran
was waddit, and they danced till fower in the byre. Me and some
ither chiels sat down to the drinkin', and here I am. Peety that I
ever lookit on the wine when it was red!'
I agreed with him about bed.
'It's easy speakin',' he moaned. 'But I got a postcard yestreen
sayin' that the new Road Surveyor would be round the day. He'll
come and he'll no find me, or else he'll find me fou, and either way
I'm a done man. I'll awa' back to my bed and say I'm no weel, but
I doot that'll no help me, for they ken my kind o' no-weel-ness.'
Then I had an inspiration. 'Does the new Surveyor know you?'
I asked.
'No him. He's just been a week at the job. He rins about in a wee
motor-cawr, and wad speir the inside oot o' a whelk.'
'Where's your house?' I asked, and was directed by a wavering
finger to the cottage by the stream.
'Well, back to your bed,' I said, 'and sleep in peace. I'll take on
your job for a bit and see the Surveyor.'
He stared at me blankly; then, as the notion dawned on his
fuddled brain, his face broke into the vacant drunkard's smile.
'You're the billy,' he cried. 'It'll be easy eneuch managed. I've
finished that bing o' stanes, so you needna chap ony mair this
forenoon. just take the barry, and wheel eneuch metal frae yon
quarry doon the road to mak anither bing the morn. My name's
Alexander Turnbull, and I've been seeven year at the trade, and
twenty afore that herdin' on Leithen Water. My freens ca' me Ecky,
and whiles Specky, for I wear glesses, being waik i' the sicht. just
you speak the Surveyor fair, and ca' him Sir, and he'll be fell
pleased. I'll be back or mid-day.'
I borrowed his spectacles and filthy old hat; stripped off coat,
waistcoat, and collar, and gave him them to carry home; borrowed,
too, the foul stump of a clay pipe as an extra property. He indicated
my simple tasks, and without more ado set off at an amble bedwards.
Bed may have been his chief object, but I think there was
also something left in the foot of a bottle. I prayed that he might be
safe under cover before my friends arrived on the scene.
Then I set to work to dress for the part. I opened the collar of
my shirt - it was a vulgar blue-and-white check such as ploughmen
wear - and revealed a neck as brown as any tinker's. I rolled up my
sleeves, and there was a forearm which might have been a blacksmith's,
sunburnt and rough with old scars. I got my boots and
trouser-legs all white from the dust of the road, and hitched up my
trousers, tying them with string below the knee. Then I set to work
on my face. With a handful of dust I made a water-mark round my
neck, the place where Mr Turnbull's Sunday ablutions might be
expected to stop. I rubbed a good deal of dirt also into the sunburn
of my cheeks. A roadman's eyes would no doubt be a little inflamed,
so I contrived to get some dust in both of mine, and by dint of
vigorous rubbing produced a bleary effect.
The sandwiches Sir Harry had given me had gone off with my
coat, but the roadman's lunch, tied up in a red handkerchief, was at
my disposal. I ate with great relish several of the thick slabs of
scone and cheese and drank a little of the cold tea. In the handkerchief
was a local paper tied with string and addressed to Mr Turnbull -
obviously meant to solace his mid-day leisure. I did up the
bundle again, and put the paper conspicuously beside it.
My boots did not satisfy me, but by dint of kicking among the
stones I reduced them to the granite-like surface which marks a
roadman's foot-gear. Then I bit and scraped my finger-nails till the
edges were all cracked and uneven. The men I was matched against
would miss no detail. I broke one of the bootlaces and retied it in a
clumsy knot, and loosed the other so that my thick grey socks
bulged over the uppers. Still no sign of anything on the road. The
motor I had observed half an hour ago must have gone home.
My toilet complete, I took up the barrow and began my journeys
to and from the quarry a hundred yards off.
I remember an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer
things in his day, once telling me that the secret of playing a part
was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up, he said,
unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it. So I
shut off all other thoughts and switched them on to the road-
mending. I thought of the little white cottage as my home, I
recalled the years I had spent herding on Leithen Water, I made my
mind dwell lovingly on sleep in a box-bed and a bottle of cheap
whisky. Still nothing appeared on that long white road.
Now and then a sheep wandered off the heather to stare at me. A
heron flopped down to a pool in the stream and started to fish,
taking no more notice of me than if I had been a milestone. On I
went, trundling my loads of stone, with the heavy step of the
professional. Soon I grew warm, and the dust on my face changed
into solid and abiding grit. I was already counting the hours till
evening should put a limit to Mr Turnbull's monotonous toil.
Suddenly a crisp voice spoke from the road, and looking up I
saw a little Ford two-seater, and a round-faced young man in a
bowler hat.
'Are you Alexander Turnbull?' he asked. 'I am the new County
Road Surveyor. You live at Blackhopefoot, and have charge of the
section from Laidlawbyres to the Riggs? Good! A fair bit of road,
Turnbull, and not badly engineered. A little soft about a mile off,
and the edges want cleaning. See you look after that. Good morning.
You'll know me the next time you see me.'
Clearly my get-up was good enough for the dreaded Surveyor. I
went on with my work, and as the morning grew towards noon I
was cheered by a little traffic. A baker's van breasted the hill, and
sold me a bag of ginger biscuits which I stowed in my trouser-
pockets against emergencies. Then a herd passed with sheep, and
disturbed me somewhat by asking loudly, 'What had become o' Specky?'
'In bed wi' the colic,' I replied, and the herd passed on ...
just about mid-day a big car stole down the hill, glided past and
drew up a hundred yards beyond. Its three occupants descended as
if to stretch their legs, and sauntered towards me.
Two of the men I had seen before from the window of the
Galloway inn - one lean, sharp, and dark, the other comfortable
and smiling. The third had the look of a countryman - a vet,
perhaps, or a small farmer. He was dressed in ill-cut knickerbockers,
and the eye in his head was as bright and wary as a hen's.
"Morning,' said the last. 'That's a fine easy job o' yours.'
I had not looked up on their approach, and now, when accosted,
I slowly and painfully straightened my back, after the manner of
roadmen; spat vigorously, after the manner of the low Scot; and
regarded them steadily before replying. I confronted three pairs of
eyes that missed nothing.
'There's waur jobs and there's better,' I said sententiously. 'I wad
rather hae yours, sittin' a' day on your hinderlands on thae cushions.
It's you and your muckle cawrs that wreck my roads! If we a' had
oor richts, ye sud be made to mend what ye break.'
The bright-eyed man was looking at the newspaper lying beside
Turnbull's bundle.
'I see you get your papers in good time,' he said.
I glanced at it casually. 'Aye, in gude time. Seein' that that paper
cam' out last Setterday I'm just Sax days late.'
He picked it up, glanced at the superscription, and laid it down
again. One of the others had been looking at my boots, and a word
in German called the speaker's attention to them.
'You've a fine taste in boots,' he said. 'These were never made
by a country shoemaker.'
'They were not,' I said readily. 'They were made in London. I
got them frae the gentleman that was here last year for the shootin'.
What was his name now?' And I scratched a forgetful head.
Again the sleek one spoke in German. 'Let us get on,' he said.
'This fellow is all right.'
They asked one last question.
'Did you see anyone pass early this morning? He might be on a
bicycle or he might be on foot.'
I very nearly fell into the trap and told a story of a bicyclist
hurrying past in the grey dawn. But I had the sense to see my
danger. I pretended to consider very deeply.
'I wasna up very early,' I said. 'Ye see, my dochter was merrit
last nicht, and we keepit it up late. I opened the house door about
seeven and there was naebody on the road then. Since I cam' up
here there has just been the baker and the Ruchill herd, besides you
gentlemen.'
One of them gave me a cigar, which I smelt gingerly and stuck
in Turnbull's bundle. They got into their car and were out of sight
in three minutes.
My heart leaped with an enormous relief, but I went on wheeling
my stones. It was as well, for ten minutes later the car returned, one
of the occupants waving a hand to me. Those gentry left nothing
to chance.
I finished Turnbull's bread and cheese, and pretty soon I had
finished the stones. The next step was what puzzled me. I could not
keep up this roadmaking business for long. A merciful Providence
had kept Mr Turnbull indoors, but if he appeared on the scene
there would be trouble. I had a notion that the cordon was still
tight round the glen, and that if I walked in any direction I should
meet with questioners. But get out I must. No man's nerve could
stand more than a day of being spied on.
I stayed at my post till five o'clock. By that time I had resolved
to go down to Turnbull's cottage at nightfall and take my chance
of getting over the hills in the darkness. But suddenly a new car
came up the road, and slowed down a yard or two from me. A
fresh wind had risen, and the occupant wanted to light a cigarette.
It was a touring car, with the tonneau full of an assortment of
baggage. One man sat in it, and by an amazing chance I knew him.
His name was Marmaduke jopley, and he was an offence to creation.
He was a sort of blood stockbroker, who did his business by
toadying eldest sons and rich young peers and foolish old ladies.
'Marmie' was a familiar figure, I understood, at balls and polo-
weeks and country houses. He was an adroit scandal-monger, and
would crawl a mile on his belly to anything that had a title or a
million. I had a business introduction to his firm when I came to
London, and he was good enough to ask me to dinner at his club.
There he showed off at a great rate, and pattered about his duchesses
till the snobbery of the creature turned me sick. I asked a man
afterwards why nobody kicked him, and was told that Englishmen
reverenced the weaker sex.
Anyhow there he was now, nattily dressed, in a fine new car,
obviously on his way to visit some of his smart friends. A sudden
daftness took me, and in a second I had jumped into the tonneau
and had him by the shoulder.
'Hullo, jopley,' I sang out. 'Well met, my lad!' He got a horrid
fright. His chin dropped as he stared at me. 'Who the devil are
YOU?' he gasped.
'My name's Hannay,' I said. 'From Rhodesia, you remember.'
'Good God, the murderer!' he choked.
'Just so. And there'll be a second murder, my dear, if you don't
do as I tell you. Give me that coat of yours. That cap, too.'
He did as bid, for he was blind with terror. Over my dirty
trousers and vulgar shirt I put on his smart driving-coat, which
buttoned high at the top and thereby hid the deficiencies of my
collar. I stuck the cap on my head, and added his gloves to my get-
up. The dusty roadman in a minute was transformed into one of
the neatest motorists in Scotland. On Mr jopley's head I clapped
Turnbull's unspeakable hat, and told him to keep it there.
Then with some difficulty I turned the car. My plan was to go
back the road he had come, for the watchers, having seen it before,
would probably let it pass unremarked, and Marmie's figure was in
no way like mine.
'Now, my child,' I said, 'sit quite still and be a good boy. I mean
you no harm. I'm only borrowing your car for an hour or two. But
if you play me any tricks, and above all if you open your mouth, as
sure as there's a God above me I'll wring your neck. SAVEZ?'
I enjoyed that evening's ride. We ran eight miles down the
valley, through a village or two, and I could not help noticing
several strange-looking folk lounging by the roadside. These were
the watchers who would have had much to say to me if I had come
in other garb or company. As it was, they looked incuriously on.
One touched his cap in salute, and I responded graciously.
As the dark fell I turned up a side glen which, as I remember
from the map, led into an unfrequented corner of the hills. Soon
the villages were left behind, then the farms, and then even the
wayside cottage. Presently we came to a lonely moor where the
night was blackening the sunset gleam in the bog pools. Here we
stopped, and I obligingly reversed the car and restored to Mr
jopley his belongings.
'A thousand thanks,' I said. 'There's more use in you than I
thought. Now be off and find the police.'
As I sat on the hillside, watching the tail-light dwindle, I reflected
on the various kinds of crime I had now sampled. Contrary to
general belief, I was not a murderer, but I had become an unholy
liar, a shameless impostor, and a highwayman with a marked taste
for expensive motor-cars.
CHAPTER SIX
The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
I spent the night on a shelf of the hillside, in the lee of a boulder
where the heather grew long and soft. It was a cold business, for I
had neither coat nor waistcoat. These were in Mr Turnbull's keeping,
as was Scudder's little book, my watch and - worst of all - my
pipe and tobacco pouch. Only my money accompanied me in my
belt, and about half a pound of ginger biscuits in my trousers pocket.
I supped off half those biscuits, and by worming myself deep
into the heather got some kind of warmth. My spirits had risen,
and I was beginning to enjoy this crazy game of hide-and-seek. So
far I had been miraculously lucky. The milkman, the literary
innkeeper, Sir Harry, the roadman, and the idiotic Marmie, were all
pieces of undeserved good fortune. Somehow the first success gave
me a feeling that I was going to pull the thing through.
My chief trouble was that I was desperately hungry. When a Jew
shoots himself in the City and there is an inquest, the newspapers
usually report that the deceased was 'well-nourished'. I remember
thinking that they would not call me well-nourished if I broke my
neck in a bog-hole. I lay and tortured myself - for the ginger
biscuits merely emphasized the aching void - with the memory of
all the good food I had thought so little of in London. There were
Paddock's crisp sausages and fragrant shavings of bacon, and
shapely poached eggs - how often I had turned up my nose at
them! There were the cutlets they did at the club, and a particular
ham that stood on the cold table, for which my soul lusted. My
thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally
settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh
rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I
fell asleep.
I woke very cold and stiff about an hour after dawn. It took me
a little while to remember where I was, for I had been very weary
and had slept heavily. I saw first the pale blue sky through a net of
heather, then a big shoulder of hill, and then my own boots placed
neatly in a blaeberry bush. I raised myself on my arms and looked
down into the valley, and that one look set me lacing up my boots
in mad haste.
For there were men below, not more than a quarter of a mile off,
spaced out on the hillside like a fan, and beating the heather.
Marmie had not been slow in looking for his revenge.
I crawled out of my shelf into the cover of a boulder, and from it
gained a shallow trench which slanted up the mountain face. This led
me presently into the narrow gully of a burn, by way of which I
scrambled to the top of the ridge. From there I looked back, and
saw that I was still undiscovered. My pursuers were patiently quartering
the hillside and moving upwards.
Keeping behind the skyline I ran for maybe half a mile, till I
judged I was above the uppermost end of the glen. Then I showed
myself, and was instantly noted by one of the flankers, who passed
the word to the others. I heard cries coming up from below, and
saw that the line of search had changed its direction. I pretended to
retreat over the skyline, but instead went back the way I had come,
and in twenty minutes was behind the ridge overlooking my sleeping
place. From that viewpoint I had the satisfaction of seeing the
pursuit streaming up the hill at the top of the glen on a hopelessly
false scent.
I had before me a choice of routes, and I chose a ridge which
made an angle with the one I was on, and so would soon put a
deep glen between me and my enemies. The exercise had warmed
my blood, and I was beginning to enjoy myself amazingly. As I
went I breakfasted on the dusty remnants of the ginger biscuits.
I knew very little about the country, and I hadn't a notion what I
was going to do. I trusted to the strength of my legs, but I was
well aware that those behind me would be familiar with the lie of
the land, and that my ignorance would be a heavy handicap. I saw
in front of me a sea of hills, rising very high towards the south, but
northwards breaking down into broad ridges which separated wide
and shallow dales. The ridge I had chosen seemed to sink after a
mile or two to a moor which lay like a pocket in the uplands. That
seemed as good a direction to take as any other.
My stratagem had given me a fair start - call it twenty minutes -
and I had the width of a glen behind me before I saw the first heads
of the pursuers. The police had evidently called in local talent to
their aid, and the men I could see had the appearance of herds or
gamekeepers. They hallooed at the sight of me, and I waved my
hand. Two dived into the glen and began to climb my ridge, while
the others kept their own side of the hill. I felt as if I were taking
part in a schoolboy game of hare and hounds.
But very soon it began to seem less of a game. Those fellows
behind were hefty men on their native heath. Looking back I saw
that only three were following direct, and I guessed that the others
had fetched a circuit to cut me off. My lack of local knowledge
might very well be my undoing, and I resolved to get out of this
tangle of glens to the pocket of moor I had seen from the tops. I
must so increase my distance as to get clear away from them, and I
believed I could do this if I could find the right ground for it. If
there had been cover I would have tried a bit of stalking, but on
these bare slopes you could see a fly a mile off. My hope must be in
the length of my legs and the soundness of my wind, but I needed
easier ground for that, for I was not bred a mountaineer. How I
longed for a good Afrikander pony!
I put on a great spurt and got off my ridge and down into the
moor before any figures appeared on the skyline behind me. I
crossed a burn, and came out on a highroad which made a pass
between two glens. All in front of me was a big field of heather
sloping up to a crest which was crowned with an odd feather of
trees. In the dyke by the roadside was a gate, from which a grass-
grown track led over the first wave of the moor.
I jumped the dyke and followed it, and after a few hundred yards
- as soon as it was out of sight of the highway - the grass stopped
and it became a very respectable road, which was evidently kept
with some care. Clearly it ran to a house, and I began to think of
doing the same. Hitherto my luck had held, and it might be that my
best chance would be found in this remote dwelling. Anyhow there
were trees there, and that meant cover.
I did not follow the road, but the burnside which flanked it on
the right, where the bracken grew deep and the high banks made a
tolerable screen. It was well I did so, for no sooner had I gained the
hollow than, looking back, I saw the pursuit topping the ridge
from which I had descended.
After that I did not look back; I had no time. I ran up the
burnside, crawling over the open places, and for a large part wading
in the shallow stream. I found a deserted cottage with a row of
phantom peat-stacks and an overgrown garden. Then I was among
young hay, and very soon had come to the edge of a plantation of
wind-blown firs. From there I saw the chimneys of the house smoking
a few hundred yards to my left. I forsook the burnside, crossed
another dyke, and almost before I knew was on a rough lawn. A
glance back told me that I was well out of sight of the pursuit,
which had not yet passed the first lift of the moor.
The lawn was a very rough place, cut with a scythe instead of a
mower, and planted with beds of scrubby rhododendrons. A brace
of black-game, which are not usually garden birds, rose at my
approach. The house before me was the ordinary moorland farm,
with a more pretentious whitewashed wing added. Attached to this
wing was a glass veranda, and through the glass I saw the face of
an elderly gentleman meekly watching me.
I stalked over the border of coarse hill gravel and entered the
open veranda door. Within was a pleasant room, glass on one side,
and on the other a mass of books. More books showed in an inner
room. On the floor, instead of tables, stood cases such as you see in
a museum, filled with coins and queer stone implements.
There was a knee-hole desk in the middle, and seated at it, with
some papers and open volumes before him, was the benevolent old
gentleman. His face was round and shiny, like Mr Pickwick's, big
glasses were stuck on the end of his nose, and the top of his head
was as bright and bare as a glass bottle. He never moved when I
entered, but raised his placid eyebrows and waited on me to speak.
It was not an easy job, with about five minutes to spare, to tell a
stranger who I was and what I wanted, and to win his aid. I did not
attempt it. There was something about the eye of the man before
me, something so keen and knowledgeable, that I could not find a
word. I simply stared at him and stuttered.
'You seem in a hurry, my friend,'he said slowly.
I nodded towards the window. It gave a prospect across the
moor through a gap in the plantation, and revealed certain figures
half a mile off straggling through the heather.
'Ah, I see,' he said, and took up a pair of field-glasses through
which he patiently scrutinized the figures.
'A fugitive from justice, eh? Well, we'll go into the matter at our
leisure. Meantime I object to my privacy being broken in upon by
the clumsy rural policeman. Go into my study, and you will see
two doors facing you. Take the one on the left and close it behind
you. You will be perfectly safe.'
And this extraordinary man took up his pen again.
I did as I was bid, and found myself in a little dark chamber
which smelt of chemicals, and was lit only by a tiny window high
up in the wall. The door had swung behind me with a click like the
door of a safe. Once again I had found an unexpected sanctuary.
All the same I was not comfortable. There was something about
the old gentleman which puzzled and rather terrified me. He had
been too easy and ready, almost as if he had expected me. And his
eyes had been horribly intelligent.
No sound came to me in that dark place. For all I knew the
police might be searching the house, and if they did they would
want to know what was behind this door. I tried to possess my soul
in patience, and to forget how hungry I was.
Then I took a more cheerful view. The old gentleman could scarcely
refuse me a meal, and I fell to reconstructing my breakfast. Bacon
and eggs would content me, but I wanted the better part of a flitch
of bacon and half a hundred eggs. And then, while my mouth was
watering in anticipation, there was a click and the door stood open.
I emerged into the sunlight to find the master of the house
sitting in a deep armchair in the room he called his study, and
regarding me with curious eyes.
'Have they gone?' I asked.
'They have gone. I convinced them that you had crossed the hill.
I do not choose that the police should come between me and one
whom I am delighted to honour. This is a lucky morning for you,
Mr Richard Hannay.'
As he spoke his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall a little over
his keen grey eyes. In a flash the phrase of Scudder's came back to
me, when he had described the man he most dreaded in the world.
He had said that he 'could hood his eyes like a hawk'. Then I saw
that I had walked straight into the enemy's headquarters.
My first impulse was to throttle the old ruffian and make for the
open air. He seemed to anticipate my intention, for he smiled
gently, and nodded to the door behind me.
I turned, and saw two men-servants who had me covered with pistols.
He knew my name, but he had never seen me before. And as the
reflection darted across my mind I saw a slender chance.
'I don't know what you mean,' I said roughly. 'And who are you
calling Richard Hannay? My name's Ainslie.'
'So?' he said, still smiling. 'But of course you have others. We
won't quarrel about a name.'
I was pulling myself together now, and I reflected that my garb,
lacking coat and waistcoat and collar, would at any rate not betray
me. I put on my surliest face and shrugged my shoulders.
'I suppose you're going to give me up after all, and I call it a
damned dirty trick. My God, I wish I had never seen that cursed
motor-car! Here's the money and be damned to you,' and I flung four
sovereigns on the table.
He opened his eyes a little. 'Oh no, I shall not give you up. My
friends and I will have a little private settlement with you, that is
all. You know a little too much, Mr Hannay. You are a clever
actor, but not quite clever enough.'
He spoke with assurance, but I could see the dawning of a doubt
in his mind.
'Oh, for God's sake stop jawing,' I cried. 'Everything's against
me. I haven't had a bit of luck since I came on shore at Leith.
What's the harm in a poor devil with an empty stomach picking up
some money he finds in a bust-up motor-car? That's all I done, and
for that I've been chivvied for two days by those blasted bobbies
over those blasted hills. I tell you I'm fair sick of it. You can do
what you like, old boy! Ned Ainslie's got no fight left in him.'
I could see that the doubt was gaining.
'Will you oblige me with the story of your recent doings?'he asked.
'I can't, guv'nor,' I said in a real beggar's whine. 'I've not had a
bite to eat for two days. Give me a mouthful of food, and then
you'll hear God's truth.'
I must have showed my hunger in my face, for he signalled to
one of the men in the doorway. A bit of cold pie was brought and a
glass of beer, and I wolfed them down like a pig - or rather, like
Ned Ainslie, for I was keeping up my character. In the middle of
my meal he spoke suddenly to me in German, but I turned on him
a face as blank as a stone wall.
Then I told him my story - how I had come off an Archangel
ship at Leith a week ago, and was making my way overland to my
brother at Wigtown. I had run short of cash - I hinted vaguely at a
spree - and I was pretty well on my uppers when I had come on a
hole in a hedge, and, looking through, had seen a big motor-car
lying in the burn. I had poked about to see what had happened, and
had found three sovereigns lying on the seat and one on the floor.
There was nobody there or any sign of an owner, so I had pocketed
the cash. But somehow the law had got after me. When I had tried
to change a sovereign in a baker's shop, the woman had cried on
the police, and a little later, when I was washing my face in a burn,
I had been nearly gripped, and had only got away by leaving my
coat and waistcoat behind me.
'They can have the money back,' I cried, 'for a fat lot of good
it's done me. Those perishers are all down on a poor man. Now, if
it had been you, guv'nor, that had found the quids, nobody would
have troubled you.'
'You're a good liar, Hannay,' he said.
I flew into a rage. 'Stop fooling, damn you! I tell you my name's
Ainslie, and I never heard of anyone called Hannay in my born
days. I'd sooner have the police than you with your Hannays and
your monkey-faced pistol tricks ... No, guv'nor, I beg pardon, I
don't mean that. I'm much obliged to you for the grub, and I'll
thank you to let me go now the coast's clear.'
It was obvious that he was badly puzzled. You see he had never
seen me, and my appearance must have altered considerably from
my photographs, if he had got one of them. I was pretty smart and
well dressed in London, and now I was a regular tramp.
'I do not propose to let you go. If you are what you say you are,
you will soon have a chance of clearing yourself. If you are what I
believe you are, I do not think you will see the light much longer.'
He rang a bell, and a third servant appeared from the veranda.
'I want the Lanchester in five minutes,' he said. 'There will be
three to luncheon.'
Then he looked steadily at me, and that was the hardest ordeal
of all.
There was something weird and devilish in those eyes, cold,
malignant, unearthly, and most hellishly clever. They fascinated me
like the bright eyes of a snake. I had a strong impulse to throw
myself on his mercy and offer to join his side, and if you consider
the way I felt about the whole thing you will see that that impulse
must have been purely physical, the weakness of a brain mesmerized
and mastered by a stronger spirit. But I managed to stick it out and
even to grin.
'You'll know me next time, guv'nor,' I said.
'Karl,' he spoke in German to one of the men in the doorway,
'you will put this fellow in the storeroom till I return, and you will
be answerable to me for his keeping.'
I was marched out of the room with a pistol at each ear.
The storeroom was a damp chamber in what had been the old
farmhouse. There was no carpet on the uneven floor, and nothing
to sit down on but a school form. It was black as pitch, for the
windows were heavily shuttered. I made out by groping that the
walls were lined with boxes and barrels and sacks of some heavy
stuff. The whole place smelt of mould and disuse. My gaolers
turned the key in the door, and I could hear them shifting their feet
as they stood on guard outside.
I sat down in that chilly darkness in a very miserable frame of
mind. The old boy had gone off in a motor to collect the two
ruffians who had interviewed me yesterday. Now, they had seen me
as the roadman, and they would remember me, for I was in the
same rig. What was a roadman doing twenty miles from his beat,
pursued by the police? A question or two would put them on the
track. Probably they had seen Mr Turnbull, probably Marmie too;
most likely they could link me up with Sir Harry, and then the
whole thing would be crystal clear. What chance had I in this
moorland house with three desperadoes and their armed servants?
I began to think wistfully of the police, now plodding over the
hills after my wraith. They at any rate were fellow-countrymen and
honest men, and their tender mercies would be kinder than these
ghoulish aliens. But they wouldn't have listened to me. That old
devil with the eyelids had not taken long to get rid of them. I
thought he probably had some kind of graft with the constabulary.
Most likely he had letters from Cabinet Ministers saying he was to
be given every facility for plotting against Britain. That's the sort
of owlish way we run our politics in the Old Country.
The three would be back for lunch, so I hadn't more than a
couple of hours to wait. It was simply waiting on destruction, for I
could see no way out of this mess. I wished that I had Scudder's
courage, for I am free to confess I didn't feel any great fortitude.
The only thing that kept me going was that I was pretty furious. It
made me boil with rage to think of those three spies getting the
pull on me like this. I hoped that at any rate I might be able to
twist one of their necks before they downed me.
The more I thought of it the angrier I grew, and I had to get up
and move about the room. I tried the shutters, but they were the
kind that lock with a key, and I couldn't move them. From the
outside came the faint clucking of hens in the warm sun. Then I
groped among the sacks and boxes. I couldn't open the latter, and
the sacks seemed to be full of things like dog-biscuits that smelt of
cinnamon. But, as I circumnavigated the room, I found a handle in
the wall which seemed worth investigating.
It was the door of a wall cupboard - what they call a 'press' in
Scotland - and it was locked. I shook it, and it seemed rather
flimsy. For want of something better to do I put out my strength
on that door, getting some purchase on the handle by looping my
braces round it. Presently the thing gave with a crash which I
thought would bring in my warders to inquire. I waited for a bit,
and then started to explore the cupboard shelves.
There was a multitude of queer things there. I found an odd
vesta or two in my trouser pockets and struck a light. It was out in
a second, but it showed me one thing. There was a little stock of
electric torches on one shelf. I picked up one, and found it was in
working order.
With the torch to help me I investigated further. There were
bottles and cases of queer-smelling stuffs, chemicals no doubt for
experiments, and there were coils of fine copper wire and yanks and
yanks of thin oiled silk. There was a box of detonators, and a lot of
cord for fuses. Then away at the back of the shelf I found a stout
brown cardboard box, and inside it a wooden case. I managed to
wrench it open, and within lay half a dozen little grey bricks, each a
couple of inches square.
I took up one, and found that it crumbled easily in my hand. Then I
smelt it and put my tongue to it. After that I sat down to think. I hadn't
been a mining engineer for nothing, and I knew lentonite when I saw it.
With one of these bricks I could blow the house to smithereens.
I had used the stuff in Rhodesia and knew its power. But the
trouble was that my knowledge wasn't exact. I had forgotten the
proper charge and the right way of preparing it, and I wasn't sure
about the timing. I had only a vague notion, too, as to its power,
for though I had used it I had not handled it with my own fingers.
But it was a chance, the only possible chance. It was a mighty
risk, but against it was an absolute black certainty. If I used it the
odds were, as I reckoned, about five to one in favour of my
blowing myself into the tree-tops; but if I didn't I should very
likely be occupying a six-foot hole in the garden by the evening.
That was the way I had to look at it. The prospect was pretty dark
either way, but anyhow there was a chance, both for myself and for
my country.
The remembrance of little Scudder decided me. It was about the
beastliest moment of my life, for I'm no good at these cold-blooded
resolutions. Still I managed to rake up the pluck to set my teeth
and choke back the horrid doubts that flooded in on me. I simply
shut off my mind and pretended I was doing an experiment as
simple as Guy Fawkes fireworks.
I got a detonator, and fixed it to a couple of feet of fuse. Then I
took a quarter of a lentonite brick, and buried it near the door
below one of the sacks in a crack of the floor, fixing the detonator
in it. For all I knew half those boxes might be dynamite. If the
cupboard held such deadly explosives, why not the boxes? In that
case there would be a glorious skyward journey for me and the
German servants and about an acre of surrounding country. There
was also the risk that the detonation might set off the other bricks
in the cupboard, for I had forgotten most that I knew about
lentonite. But it didn't do to begin thinking about the possibilities.
The odds were horrible, but I had to take them.
I ensconced myself just below the sill of the window, and lit the
fuse. Then I waited for a moment or two. There was dead silence -
only a shuffle of heavy boots in the passage, and the peaceful cluck
of hens from the warm out-of-doors. I commended my soul to my
Maker, and wondered where I would be in five seconds ...
A great wave of heat seemed to surge upwards from the floor,
and hang for a blistering instant in the air. Then the wall opposite
me flashed into a golden yellow and dissolved with a rending
thunder that hammered my brain into a pulp. Something dropped
on me, catching the point of my left shoulder.
And then I think I became unconscious.
My stupor can scarcely have lasted beyond a few seconds. I felt
myself being choked by thick yellow fumes, and struggled out of
the debris to my feet. Somewhere behind me I felt fresh air. The
jambs of the window had fallen, and through the ragged rent the
smoke was pouring out to the summer noon. I stepped over the
broken lintel, and found myself standing in a yard in a dense and
acrid fog. I felt very sick and ill, but I could move my limbs, and I
staggered blindly forward away from the house.
A small mill-lade ran in a wooden aqueduct at the other side of
the yard, and into this I fell. The cool water revived me, and I had
just enough wits left to think of escape. I squirmed up the lade
among the slippery green slime till I reached the mill-wheel. Then I
wriggled through the axle hole into the old mill and tumbled on to
a bed of chaff. A nail caught the seat of my trousers, and I left a
wisp of heather-mixture behind me.
The mill had been long out of use. The ladders were rotten with
age, and in the loft the rats had gnawed great holes in the floor.
Nausea shook me, and a wheel in my head kept turning, while my
left shoulder and arm seemed to be stricken with the palsy. I looked
out of the window and saw a fog still hanging over the house and
smoke escaping from an upper window. Please God I had set the
place on fire, for I could hear confused cries coming from the
other side.
But I had no time to linger, since this mill was obviously a bad
hiding-place. Anyone looking for me would naturally follow the
lade, and I made certain the search would begin as soon as they
found that my body was not in the storeroom. From another
window I saw that on the far side of the mill stood an old stone
dovecot. If I could get there without leaving tracks I might find a
hiding-place, for I argued that my enemies, if they thought I could
move, would conclude I had made for open country, and would go
seeking me on the moor.
I crawled down the broken ladder, scattering chaff behind me to
cover my footsteps. I did the same on the mill floor, and on the
threshold where the door hung on broken hinges. Peeping out, I
saw that between me and the dovecot was a piece of bare cobbled
ground, where no footmarks would show. Also it was mercifully
hid by the mill buildings from any view from the house. I slipped
across the space, got to the back of the dovecot and prospected a
way of ascent.
That was one of the hardest jobs I ever took on. My shoulder
and arm ached like hell, and I was so sick and giddy that I was
always on the verge of falling. But I managed it somehow. By the
use of out-jutting stones and gaps in the masonry and a tough ivy
root I got to the top in the end. There was a little parapet behind
which I found space to lie down. Then I proceeded to go off into
an old-fashioned swoon.
I woke with a burning head and the sun glaring in my face. For a
long time I lay motionless, for those horrible fumes seemed to have
loosened my joints and dulled my brain. Sounds came to me from
the house - men speaking throatily and the throbbing of a stationary
car. There was a little gap in the parapet to which I wriggled, and
from which I had some sort of prospect of the yard. I saw figures
come out - a servant with his head bound up, and then a younger
man in knickerbockers. They were looking for something, and
moved towards the mill. Then one of them caught sight of the wisp
of cloth on the nail, and cried out to the other. They both went
back to the house, and brought two more to look at it. I saw the
rotund figure of my late captor, and I thought I made out the man
with the lisp. I noticed that all had pistols.
For half an hour they ransacked the mill. I could hear them
kicking over the barrels and pulling up the rotten planking. Then
they came outside, and stood just below the dovecot arguing
fiercely. The servant with the bandage was being soundly rated. I
heard them fiddling with the door of the dovecote and for one
horrid moment I fancied they were coming up. Then they thought
better of it, and went back to the house.
All that long blistering afternoon I lay baking on the rooftop.
Thirst was my chief torment. My tongue was like a stick, and to
make it worse I could hear the cool drip of water from the mill-
lade. I watched the course of the little stream as it came in from the
moor, and my fancy followed it to the top of the glen, where it
must issue from an icy fountain fringed with cool ferns and mosses.
I would have given a thousand pounds to plunge my face into that.
I had a fine prospect of the whole ring of moorland. I saw the
car speed away with two occupants, and a man on a hill pony
riding east. I judged they were looking for me, and I wished them
joy of their quest.
But I saw something else more interesting. The house stood
almost on the summit of a swell of moorland which crowned a sort
of plateau, and there was no higher point nearer than the big hills
six miles off. The actual summit, as I have mentioned, was a
biggish clump of trees - firs mostly, with a few ashes and beeches.
On the dovecot I was almost on a level with the tree-tops, and
could see what lay beyond. The wood was not solid, but only a
ring, and inside was an oval of green turf, for all the world like a
big cricket-field.
I didn't take long to guess what it was. It was an aerodrome, and
a secret one. The place had been most cunningly chosen. For
suppose anyone were watching an aeroplane descending here, he
would think it had gone over the hill beyond the trees. As the place
was on the top of a rise in the midst of a big amphitheatre, any
observer from any direction would conclude it had passed out of
view behind the hill. Only a man very close at hand would realize
that the aeroplane had not gone over but had descended in the
midst of the wood. An observer with a telescope on one of the
higher hills might have discovered the truth, but only herds went
there, and herds do not carry spy-glasses. When I looked from the
dovecot I could see far away a blue line which I knew was the sea,
and I grew furious to think that our enemies had this secret
conning-tower to rake our waterways.
Then I reflected that if that aeroplane came back the chances
were ten to one that I would be discovered. So through the afternoon
I lay and prayed for the coming of darkness, and glad I was
when the sun went down over the big western hills and the twilight
haze crept over the moor. The aeroplane was late. The gloaming
was far advanced when I heard the beat of wings and saw it volplaning
downward to its home in the wood. Lights twinkled for a
bit and there was much coming and going from the house. Then
the dark fell, and silence.
Thank God it was a black night. The moon was well on its last
quarter and would not rise till late. My thirst was too great to allow
me to tarry, so about nine o'clock, so far as I could judge, I started
to descend. It wasn't easy, and half-way down I heard the back door
of the house open, and saw the gleam of a lantern against the mill
wall. For some agonizing minutes I hung by the ivy and prayed
that whoever it was would not come round by the dovecot. Then
the light disappeared, and I dropped as softly as I could on to the
hard soil of the yard.
I crawled on my belly in the lee of a stone dyke till I reached the
fringe of trees which surrounded the house. If I had known how to
do it I would have tried to put that aeroplane out of action, but I
realized that any attempt would probably be futile. I was pretty
certain that there would be some kind of defence round the house,
so I went through the wood on hands and knees, feeling carefully
every inch before me. It was as well, for presently I came on a wire
about two feet from the ground. If I had tripped over that, it
would doubtless have rung some bell in the house and I would
have been captured.
A hundred yards farther on I found another wire cunningly
placed on the edge of a small stream. Beyond that lay the moor, and
in five minutes I was deep in bracken and heather. Soon I was
round the shoulder of the rise, in the little glen from which the
mill-lade flowed. Ten minutes later my face was in the spring, and I
was soaking down pints of the blessed water.
But I did not stop till I had put half a dozen miles between me
and that accursed dwelling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Dry-Fly Fisherman
I sat down on a hill-top and took stock of my position. I wasn't
feeling very happy, for my natural thankfulness at my escape was
clouded by my severe bodily discomfort. Those lentonite fumes had
fairly poisoned me, and the baking hours on the dovecot hadn't
helped matters. I had a crushing headache, and felt as sick as a cat.
Also my shoulder was in a bad way. At first I thought it was only a
bruise, but it seemed to be swelling, and I had no use of my left arm.
My plan was to seek Mr Turnbull's cottage, recover my garments,
and especially Scudder's note-book, and then make for the main
line and get back to the south. It seemed to me that the sooner I
got in touch with the Foreign Office man, Sir Walter Bullivant, the
better. I didn't see how I could get more proof than I had got
already. He must just take or leave my story, and anyway, with him
I would be in better hands than those devilish Germans. I had
begun to feel quite kindly towards the British police.
It was a wonderful starry night, and I had not much difficulty
about the road. Sir Harry's map had given me the lie of the land,
and all I had to do was to steer a point or two west of south-west
to come to the stream where I had met the roadman. In all these
travels I never knew the names of the places, but I believe this
stream was no less than the upper waters of the river Tweed. I
calculated I must be about eighteen miles distant, and that meant I
could not get there before morning. So I must lie up a day somewhere,
for I was too outrageous a figure to be seen in the sunlight.
I had neither coat, waistcoat, collar, nor hat, my trousers were
badly torn, and my face and hands were black with the explosion. I
daresay I had other beauties, for my eyes felt as if they were
furiously bloodshot. Altogether I was no spectacle for God-fearing
citizens to see on a highroad.
Very soon after daybreak I made an attempt to clean myself in a
hill burn, and then approached a herd's cottage, for I was feeling
the need of food. The herd was away from home, and his wife was
alone, with no neighbour for five miles. She was a decent old body,
and a plucky one, for though she got a fright when she saw me, she
had an axe handy, and would have used it on any evil-doer. I told
her that I had had a fall - I didn't say how - and she saw by my
looks that I was pretty sick. Like a true Samaritan she asked no
questions, but gave me a bowl of milk with a dash of whisky in it,
and let me sit for a little by her kitchen fire. She would have bathed
my shoulder, but it ached so badly that I would not let her touch it.
I don't know what she took me for - a repentant burglar,
perhaps; for when I wanted to pay her for the milk and tendered a
sovereign which was the smallest coin I had, she shook her head
and said something about 'giving it to them that had a right to it'.
At this I protested so strongly that I think she believed me honest,
for she took the money and gave me a warm new plaid for it, and
an old hat of her man's. She showed me how to wrap the plaid
around my shoulders, and when I left that cottage I was the living
image of the kind of Scotsman you see in the illustrations to
Burns's poems. But at any rate I was more or less clad.
It was as well, for the weather changed before midday to a thick
drizzle of rain. I found shelter below an overhanging rock in the
crook of a burn, where a drift of dead brackens made a tolerable
bed. There I managed to sleep till nightfall, waking very cramped
and wretched, with my shoulder gnawing like a toothache. I ate the
oatcake and cheese the old wife had given me and set out again just
before the darkening.
I pass over the miseries of that night among the wet hills. There
were no stars to steer by, and I had to do the best I could from my
memory of the map. Twice I lost my way, and I had some nasty
falls into peat-bogs. I had only about ten miles to go as the crow
flies, but my mistakes made it nearer twenty. The last bit was
completed with set teeth and a very light and dizzy head. But I
managed it, and in the early dawn I was knocking at Mr Turnbull's
door. The mist lay close and thick, and from the cottage I could
not see the highroad.
Mr Turnbull himself opened to me - sober and something more
than sober. He was primly dressed in an ancient but well-tended
suit of black; he had been shaved not later than the night before; he
wore a linen collar; and in his left hand he carried a pocket Bible.
At first he did not recognize me.
'Whae are ye that comes stravaigin' here on the Sabbath mornin'?'
he asked.
I had lost all count of the days. So the Sabbath was the reason
for this strange decorum.
My head was swimming so wildly that I could not frame a
coherent answer. But he recognized me, and he saw that I was ill.
'Hae ye got my specs?' he asked.
I fetched them out of my trouser pocket and gave him them.
'Ye'll hae come for your jaicket and westcoat,' he said. 'Come in-
bye. Losh, man, ye're terrible dune i' the legs. Haud up till I get ye
to a chair.'
I perceived I was in for a bout of malaria. I had a good deal of
fever in my bones, and the wet night had brought it out, while my
shoulder and the effects of the fumes combined to make me feel
pretty bad. Before I knew, Mr Turnbull was helping me off with
my clothes, and putting me to bed in one of the two cupboards that
lined the kitchen walls.
He was a true friend in need, that old roadman. His wife was
dead years ago, and since his daughter's marriage he lived alone.
For the better part of ten days he did all the rough nursing I
needed. I simply wanted to be left in peace while the fever took its
course, and when my skin was cool again I found that the bout had
more or less cured my shoulder. But it was a baddish go, and
though I was out of bed in five days, it took me some time to get
my legs again.
He went out each morning, leaving me milk for the day, and
locking the door behind him; and came in in the evening to sit
silent in the chimney corner. Not a soul came near the place. When
I was getting better, he never bothered me with a question. Several
times he fetched me a two days' old SCOTSMAN, and I noticed that the
interest in the Portland Place murder seemed to have died down.
There was no mention of it, and I could find very little about
anything except a thing called the General Assembly - some
ecclesiastical spree, I gathered.
One day he produced my belt from a lockfast drawer. 'There's a
terrible heap o' siller in't,' he said. 'Ye'd better coont it to see
it's a' there.'
He never even sought my name. I asked him if anybody had
been around making inquiries subsequent to my spell at the road-making.
'Ay, there was a man in a motor-cawr. He speired whae had ta'en
my place that day, and I let on I thocht him daft. But he keepit on
at me, and syne I said he maun be thinkin' o' my gude-brither frae
the Cleuch that whiles lent me a haun'. He was a wersh-lookin'
sowl, and I couldna understand the half o' his English tongue.'
I was getting restless those last days, and as soon as I felt myself
fit I decided to be off. That was not till the twelfth day of June,
and as luck would have it a drover went past that morning taking
some cattle to Moffat. He was a man named Hislop, a friend of
Turnbull's, and he came in to his breakfast with us and offered to
take me with him.
I made Turnbull accept five pounds for my lodging, and a hard
job I had of it. There never was a more independent being. He
grew positively rude when I pressed him, and shy and red, and
took the money at last without a thank you. When I told him how
much I owed him, he grunted something about 'ae guid turn
deservin' anither'. You would have thought from our leave-taking
that we had parted in disgust.
Hislop was a cheery soul, who chattered all the way over the pass
and down the sunny vale of Annan. I talked of Galloway markets
and sheep prices, and he made up his mind I was a 'pack-shepherd'
from those parts - whatever that may be. My plaid and my old hat,
as I have said, gave me a fine theatrical Scots look. But driving
cattle is a mortally slow job, and we took the better part of the day
to cover a dozen miles.
If I had not had such an anxious heart I would have enjoyed that
time. It was shining blue weather, with a constantly changing
prospect of brown hills and far green meadows, and a continual
sound of larks and curlews and falling streams. But I had no mind
for the summer, and little for Hislop's conversation, for as the
fateful fifteenth of June drew near I was overweighed with the
hopeless difficulties of my enterprise.
I got some dinner in a humble Moffat public-house, and walked
the two miles to the junction on the main line. The night express
for the south was not due till near midnight, and to fill up the time
I went up on the hillside and fell asleep, for the walk had tired me.
I all but slept too long, and had to run to the station and catch the
train with two minutes to spare. The feel of the hard third-class
cushions and the smell of stale tobacco cheered me up wonderfully.
At any rate, I felt now that I was getting to grips with my job.
I was decanted at Crewe in the small hours and had to wait till six to
get a train for Birmingham. In the afternoon I got to Reading, and
changed into a local train which journeyed into the deeps of Berkshire.
Presently I was in a land of lush water-meadows and slow
reedy streams. About eight o'clock in the evening, a weary and
travel-stained being - a cross between a farm-labourer and a vet -
with a checked black-and-white plaid over his arm (for I did not
dare to wear it south of the Border), descended at the little station
of Artinswell. There were several people on the platform, and I
thought I had better wait to ask my way till I was clear of the place.
The road led through a wood of great beeches and then into a
shallow valley, with the green backs of downs peeping over the
distant trees. After Scotland the air smelt heavy and flat, but
infinitely sweet, for the limes and chestnuts and lilac bushes were domes
of blossom. Presently I came to a bridge, below which a clear slow
stream flowed between snowy beds of water-buttercups. A little
above it was a mill; and the lasher made a pleasant cool sound in
the scented dusk. Somehow the place soothed me and put me at my
ease. I fell to whistling as I looked into the green depths, and the
tune which came to my lips was 'Annie Laurie'.
A fisherman came up from the waterside, and as he neared me he
too began to whistle. The tune was infectious, for he followed my
suit. He was a huge man in untidy old flannels and a wide-brimmed
hat, with a canvas bag slung on his shoulder. He nodded to me,
and I thought I had never seen a shrewder or better-tempered face.
He leaned his delicate ten-foot split-cane rod against the bridge,
and looked with me at the water.
'Clear, isn't it?' he said pleasantly. 'I back our Kenner any day
against the Test. Look at that big fellow. Four pounds if he's an
ounce. But the evening rise is over and you can't tempt 'em.'
'I don't see him,' said I.
'Look! There! A yard from the reeds just above that stickle.'
'I've got him now. You might swear he was a black stone.'
'So,' he said, and whistled another bar of 'Annie Laurie'.
'Twisdon's the name, isn't it?' he said over his shoulder, his eyes
still fixed on the stream.
'No,' I said. 'I mean to say, Yes.' I had forgotten all about
my alias.
'It's a wise conspirator that knows his own name,' he observed,
grinning broadly at a moor-hen that emerged from the bridge's shadow.
I stood up and looked at him, at the square, cleft jaw and broad,
lined brow and the firm folds of cheek, and began to think that
here at last was an ally worth having. His whimsical blue eyes
seemed to go very deep.
Suddenly he frowned. 'I call it disgraceful,' he said, raising his
voice. 'Disgraceful that an able-bodied man like you should dare to
beg. You can get a meal from my kitchen, but you'll get no money
from me.'
A dog-cart was passing, driven by a young man who raised his
whip to salute the fisherman. When he had gone, he picked up his rod.
'That's my house,' he said, pointing to a white gate a hundred
yards on. 'Wait five minutes and then go round to the back door.'
And with that he left me.
I did as I was bidden. I found a pretty cottage with a lawn
running down to the stream, and a perfect jungle of guelder-rose
and lilac flanking the path. The back door stood open, and a grave
butler was awaiting me.
'Come this way, Sir,' he said, and he led me along a passage and
up a back staircase to a pleasant bedroom looking towards the
river. There I found a complete outfit laid out for me - dress
clothes with all the fixings, a brown flannel suit, shirts, collars, ties,
shaving things and hair-brushes, even a pair of patent shoes. 'Sir
Walter thought as how Mr Reggie's things would fit you, Sir,' said
the butler. 'He keeps some clothes 'ere, for he comes regular on the
week-ends. There's a bathroom next door, and I've prepared a 'ot
bath. Dinner in 'alf an hour, Sir. You'll 'ear the gong.'
The grave being withdrew, and I sat down in a chintz-covered
easy-chair and gaped. It was like a pantomime, to come suddenly out
of beggardom into this orderly comfort. Obviously Sir Walter
believed in me, though why he did I could not guess. I looked at
myself in the mirror and saw a wild, haggard brown fellow, with a
fortnight's ragged beard, and dust in ears and eyes, collarless,
vulgarly shirted, with shapeless old tweed clothes and boots that
had not been cleaned for the better part of a month. I made a fine
tramp and a fair drover; and here I was ushered by a prim butler
into this temple of gracious ease. And the best of it was that they
did not even know my name.
I resolved not to puzzle my head but to take the gifts the gods
had provided. I shaved and bathed luxuriously, and got into the
dress clothes and clean crackling shirt, which fitted me not so
badly. By the time I had finished the looking-glass showed a not
unpersonable young man.
Sir Walter awaited me in a dusky dining-room where a little
round table was lit with silver candles. The sight of him - so
respectable and established and secure, the embodiment of law and
government and all the conventions - took me aback and made me
feel an interloper. He couldn't know the truth about me, or he
wouldn't treat me like this. I simply could not accept his hospitality
on false pretences.
'I'm more obliged to you than I can say, but I'm bound to make
things clear,' I said. 'I'm an innocent man, but I'm wanted by the
police. I've got to tell you this, and I won't be surprised if you kick
me out.'
He smiled. 'That's all right. Don't let that interfere with your
appetite. We can talk about these things after dinner.'
I never ate a meal with greater relish, for I had had nothing all
day but railway sandwiches. Sir Walter did me proud, for we drank
a good champagne and had some uncommon fine port afterwards.
it made me almost hysterical to be sitting there, waited on by a
footman and a sleek butler, and remember that I had been living
for three weeks like a brigand, with every man's hand against me. I
told Sir Walter about tiger-fish in the Zambesi that bite off your
fingers if you give them a chance, and we discussed sport up and
down the globe, for he had hunted a bit in his day.
We went to his study for coffee, a jolly room full of books and
trophies and untidiness and comfort. I made up my mind that if
ever I got rid of this business and had a house of my own, I would
create just such a room. Then when the coffee-cups were cleared
away, and we had got our cigars alight, my host swung his long
legs over the side of his chair and bade me get started with my yarn.
'I've obeyed Harry's instructions,' he said, 'and the bribe he
offered me was that you would tell me something to wake me up.
I'm ready, Mr Hannay.'
I noticed with a start that he called me by my proper name.
I began at the very beginning. I told of my boredom in London,
and the night I had come back to find Scudder gibbering on my
doorstep. I told him all Scudder had told me about Karolides and
the Foreign Office conference, and that made him purse his lips and grin.
Then I got to the murder, and he grew solemn again. He heard
all about the milkman and my time in Galloway, and my deciphering
Scudder's notes at the inn.
'You've got them here?' he asked sharply, and drew a long
breath when I whipped the little book from my pocket.
I said nothing of the contents. Then I described my meeting
with Sir Harry, and the speeches at the hall. At that he laughed
uproariously.
'Harry talked dashed nonsense, did he? I quite believe it. He's as
good a chap as ever breathed, but his idiot of an uncle has stuffed
his head with maggots. Go on, Mr Hannay.'
My day as roadman excited him a bit. He made me describe the
two fellows in the car very closely, and seemed to be raking back in
his memory. He grew merry again when he heard of the fate of that
ass jopley.
But the old man in the moorland house solemnized him. Again I
had to describe every detail of his appearance.
'Bland and bald-headed and hooded his eyes like a bird ... He
sounds a sinister wild-fowl! And you dynamited his hermitage,
after he had saved you from the police. Spirited piece of work, that!'
Presently I reached the end of my wanderings. He got up slowly,
and looked down at me from the hearth-rug.
'You may dismiss the police from your mind,' he said. 'You're in
no danger from the law of this land.'
'Great Scot!' I cried. 'Have they got the murderer?'
'No. But for the last fortnight they have dropped you from the
list of possibles.'
'Why?' I asked in amazement.
'Principally because I received a letter from Scudder. I knew
something of the man, and he did several jobs for me. He was half
crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest. The trouble about
him was his partiality for playing a lone hand. That made him
pretty well useless in any Secret Service - a pity, for he had uncommon
gifts. I think he was the bravest man in the world, for he was
always shivering with fright, and yet nothing would choke him off.
I had a letter from him on the 31st of May.'
'But he had been dead a week by then.'
'The letter was written and posted on the 23rd. He evidently did
not anticipate an immediate decease. His communications usually
took a week to reach me, for they were sent under cover to Spain
and then to Newcastle. He had a mania, you know, for concealing
his tracks.'
'What did he say?' I stammered.
'Nothing. Merely that he was in danger, but had found shelter
with a good friend, and that I would hear from him before the 15th
of June. He gave me no address, but said he was living near
Portland Place. I think his object was to clear you if anything
happened. When I got it I went to Scotland Yard, went over the
details of the inquest, and concluded that you were the friend. We
made inquiries about you, Mr Hannay, and found you were respectable.
I thought I knew the motives for your disappearance - not
only the police, the other one too - and when I got Harry's scrawl I
guessed at the rest. I have been expecting you any time this past week.'
You can imagine what a load this took off my mind. I felt a free
man once more, for I was now up against my country's enemies
only, and not my country's law.
'Now let us have the little note-book,' said Sir Walter.
It took us a good hour to work through it. I explained the
cypher, and he was jolly quick at picking it up. He emended my
reading of it on several points, but I had been fairly correct, on the
whole. His face was very grave before he had finished, and he sat
silent for a while.
'I don't know what to make of it,' he said at last. 'He is right
about one thing - what is going to happen the day after tomorrow.
How the devil can it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself.
But all this about war and the Black Stone - it reads like some wild
melodrama. If only I had more confidence in Scudder's judgement.
The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the
artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God
meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for example,
made him see red. Jews and the high finance.
'The Black Stone,' he repeated. 'DER SCHWARZE STEIN. It's like a
penny novelette. And all this stuff about Karolides. That is the
weak part of the tale, for I happen to know that the virtuous
Karolides is likely to outlast us both. There is no State in Europe
that wants him gone. Besides, he has just been playing up to Berlin
and Vienna and giving my Chief some uneasy moments. No! Scudder has
gone off the track there. Frankly, Hannay, I don't believe that part of
his story. There's some nasty business afoot, and he found out too much
and lost his life over it. But I am ready to take my oath that it is
ordinary spy work. A certain great European Power makes a hobby of her
spy system, and her methods are not too particular. Since she pays by
piecework her blackguards are not likely to stick at a murder or two.
They want our naval dispositions for their collection at the Marineamt;
but they will be pigeon-holed - nothing more.'
just then the butler entered the room.
'There's a trunk-call from London, Sir Walter. It's Mr 'Eath, and
he wants to speak to you personally.'
My host went off to the telephone.
He returned in five minutes with a whitish face. 'I apologize to
the shade of Scudder,' he said. 'Karolides was shot dead this evening
at a few minutes after seven.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Coming of the Black Stone
I came down to breakfast next morning, after eight hours of blessed
dreamless sleep, to find Sir Walter decoding a telegram in the midst
of muffins and marmalade. His fresh rosiness of yesterday seemed a
thought tarnished.
'I had a busy hour on the telephone after you went to bed,' he
said. 'I got my Chief to speak to the First Lord and the Secretary
for War, and they are bringing Royer over a day sooner. This wire
clinches it. He will be in London at five. Odd that the code word
for a SOUS-CHEF D/ETAT MAJOR-GENERAL should be "Porker".'
He directed me to the hot dishes and went on.
'Not that I think it will do much good. If your friends were
clever enough to find out the first arrangement they are clever
enough to discover the change. I would give my head to know
where the leak is. We believed there were only five men in England
who knew about Royer's visit, and you may be certain there were
fewer in France, for they manage these things better there.'
While I ate he continued to talk, making me to my surprise a
present of his full confidence.
'Can the dispositions not be changed?' I asked.
'They could,' he said. 'But we want to avoid that if possible.
They are the result of immense thought, and no alteration would be
as good. Besides, on one or two points change is simply impossible.
Still, something could be done, I suppose, if it were absolutely
necessary. But you see the difficulty, Hannay. Our enemies are not
going to be such fools as to pick Royer's pocket or any childish
game like that. They know that would mean a row and put us on
our guard. Their aim is to get the details without any one of us
knowing, so that Royer will go back to Paris in the belief that the
whole business is still deadly secret. If they can't do that they fail,
for, once we suspect, they know that the whole thing must be altered.'
'Then we must stick by the Frenchman's side till he is home
again,' I said. 'If they thought they could get the information in
Paris they would try there. It means that they have some deep
scheme on foot in London which they reckon is going to win out.'
'Royer dines with my Chief, and then comes to my house where
four people will see him - Whittaker from the Admiralty, myself,
Sir Arthur Drew, and General Winstanley. The First Lord is ill,
and has gone to Sheringham. At my house he will get a certain
document from Whittaker, and after that he will be motored to
Portsmouth where a destroyer will take him to Havre. His journey
is too important for the ordinary boat-train. He will never be left
unattended for a moment till he is safe on French soil. The same
with Whittaker till he meets Royer. That is the best we can do, and
it's hard to see how there can be any miscarriage. But I don't mind
admitting that I'm horribly nervous. This murder of Karolides will
play the deuce in the chancelleries of Europe.'
After breakfast he asked me if I could drive a car.
'Well, you'll be my chauffeur today and wear Hudson's rig.
You're about his size. You have a hand in this business and we are
taking no risks. There are desperate men against us, who will not
respect the country retreat of an overworked official.'
When I first came to London I had bought a car and amused
myself with running about the south of England, so I knew something
of the geography. I took Sir Walter to town by the Bath
Road and made good going. It was a soft breathless June morning,
with a promise of sultriness later, but it was delicious enough
swinging through the little towns with their freshly watered streets,
and past the summer gardens of the Thames valley. I landed Sir
Walter at his house in Queen Anne's Gate punctually by half-past
eleven. The butler was coming up by train with the luggage.
The first thing he did was to take me round to Scotland Yard.
There we saw a prim gentleman, with a clean-shaven, lawyer's face.
'I've brought you the Portland Place murderer,' was Sir Walter's
introduction.
The reply was a wry smile. 'It would have been a welcome
present, Bullivant. This, I presume, is Mr Richard Hannay, who for
some days greatly interested my department.'
'Mr Hannay will interest it again. He has much to tell you, but
not today. For certain grave reasons his tale must wait for
four hours. Then, I can promise you, you will be entertained and
possibly edified. I want you to assure Mr Hannay that he will suffer
no further inconvenience.'
This assurance was promptly given. 'You can take up your life
where you left off,' I was told. 'Your flat, which probably you no
longer wish to occupy, is waiting for you, and your man is still
there. As you were never publicly accused, we considered that there
was no need of a public exculpation. But on that, of course, you
must please yourself.'
'We may want your assistance later on, MacGillivray,' Sir Walter
said as we left.
Then he turned me loose.
'Come and see me tomorrow, Hannay. I needn't tell you to keep
deadly quiet. If I were you I would go to bed, for you must have
considerable arrears of sleep to overtake. You had better lie low,
for if one of your Black Stone friends saw you there might be trouble.'
I felt curiously at a loose end. At first it was very pleasant to be a
free man, able to go where I wanted without fearing anything. I
had only been a month under the ban of the law, and it was quite
enough for me. I went to the Savoy and ordered very carefully a
very good luncheon, and then smoked the best cigar the house
could provide. But I was still feeling nervous. When I saw anybody
look at me in the lounge, I grew shy, and wondered if they were
thinking about the murder.
After that I took a taxi and drove miles away up into North
London. I walked back through fields and lines of villas and terraces
and then slums and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two
hours. All the while my restlessness was growing worse. I felt that
great things, tremendous things, were happening or about to
happen, and I, who was the cog-wheel of the whole business, was
out of it. Royer would be landing at Dover, Sir Walter would be
making plans with the few people in England who were in the
secret, and somewhere in the darkness the Black Stone would be
working. I felt the sense of danger and impending calamity, and I
had the curious feeling, too, that I alone could avert it, alone could
grapple with it. But I was out of the game now. How could it be
otherwise? It was not likely that Cabinet Ministers and Admiralty
Lords and Generals would admit me to their councils.
I actually began to wish that I could run up against one of my
three enemies. That would lead to developments. I felt that I
wanted enormously to have a vulgar scrap with those gentry, where
I could hit out and flatten something. I was rapidly getting into a
very bad temper.
I didn't feel like going back to my flat. That had to be faced
some time, but as I still had sufficient money I thought I would put
it off till next morning, and go to a hotel for the night.
My irritation lasted through dinner, which I had at a restaurant
in Jermyn Street. I was no longer hungry, and let several courses
pass untasted. I drank the best part of a bottle of Burgundy, but it
did nothing to cheer me. An abominable restlessness had taken
possession of me. Here was I, a very ordinary fellow, with no
particular brains, and yet I was convinced that somehow I was
needed to help this business through - that without me it would all
go to blazes. I told myself it was sheer silly conceit, that four or
five of the cleverest people living, with all the might of the British
Empire at their back, had the job in hand. Yet I couldn't be
convinced. It seemed as if a voice kept speaking in my ear, telling
me to be up and doing, or I would never sleep again.
The upshot was that about half-past nine I made up my mind to
go to Queen Anne's Gate. Very likely I would not be admitted, but
it would ease my conscience to try.
I walked down Jermyn Street, and at the corner of Duke Street
passed a group of young men. They were in evening dress, had
been dining somewhere, and were going on to a music-hall. One of
them was Mr Marmaduke jopley.
He saw me and stopped short.
'By God, the murderer!' he cried. 'Here, you fellows, hold him!
That's Hannay, the man who did the Portland Place murder!' He
gripped me by the arm, and the others crowded round.
I wasn't looking for any trouble, but my ill-temper made me play
the fool. A policeman came up, and I should have told him the
truth, and, if he didn't believe it, demanded to be taken to Scotland
Yard, or for that matter to the nearest police station. But a delay at
that moment seemed to me unendurable, and the sight of Marmie's
imbecile face was more than I could bear. I let out with my left,
and had the satisfaction of seeing him measure his length in the
gutter.
Then began an unholy row. They were all on me at once, and
the policeman took me in the rear. I got in one or two good blows,
for I think, with fair play, I could have licked the lot of them, but
the policeman pinned me behind, and one of them got his fingers
on my throat.
Through a black cloud of rage I heard the officer of the law
asking what was the matter, and Marmie, between his broken teeth,
declaring that I was Hannay the murderer.
'Oh, damn it all,' I cried, 'make the fellow shut up. I advise you
to leave me alone, constable. Scotland Yard knows all about me,
and you'll get a proper wigging if you interfere with me.'
'You've got to come along of me, young man,' said the policeman.
'I saw you strike that gentleman crool 'ard. You began it too,
for he wasn't doing nothing. I seen you. Best go quietly or I'll have
to fix you up.'
Exasperation and an overwhelming sense that at no cost must I
delay gave me the strength of a bull elephant. I fairly wrenched the
constable off his feet, floored the man who was gripping my collar,
and set off at my best pace down Duke Street. I heard a whistle
being blown, and the rush of men behind me.
I have a very fair turn of speed, and that night I had wings. In a
jiffy I was in Pall Mall and had turned down towards St James's
Park. I dodged the policeman at the Palace gates, dived through a
press of carriages at the entrance to the Mall, and was making for
the bridge before my pursuers had crossed the roadway. In the
open ways of the Park I put on a spurt. Happily there were few
people about and no one tried to stop me. I was staking all on
getting to Queen Anne's Gate.
When I entered that quiet thoroughfare it seemed deserted. Sir
Walter's house was in the narrow part, and outside it three or four
motor-cars were drawn up. I slackened speed some yards off and
walked briskly up to the door. If the butler refused me admission,
or if he even delayed to open the door, I was done.
He didn't delay. I had scarcely rung before the door opened.
'I must see Sir Walter,' I panted. 'My business is desperately
important.'
That butler was a great man. Without moving a muscle he held
the door open, and then shut it behind me. 'Sir Walter is engaged,
Sir, and I have orders to admit no one. Perhaps you will wait.'
The house was of the old-fashioned kind, with a wide hall and
rooms on both sides of it. At the far end was an alcove with a
telephone and a couple of chairs, and there the butler offered me a seat.
'See here,' I whispered. 'There's trouble about and I'm in it. But
Sir Walter knows, and I'm working for him. If anyone comes and
asks if I am here, tell him a lie.'
He nodded, and presently there was a noise of voices in the
street, and a furious ringing at the bell. I never admired a man
more than that butler. He opened the door, and with a face like a
graven image waited to be questioned. Then he gave them it. He
told them whose house it was, and what his orders were, and
simply froze them off the doorstep. I could see it all from my
alcove, and it was better than any play.
I hadn't waited long till there came another ring at the bell. The
butler made no bones about admitting this new visitor.
While he was taking off his coat I saw who it was. You couldn't
open a newspaper or a magazine without seeing that face - the grey
beard cut like a spade, the firm fighting mouth, the blunt square
nose, and the keen blue eyes. I recognized the First Sea Lord, the
man, they say, that made the new British Navy.
He passed my alcove and was ushered into a room at the back of
the hall. As the door opened I could hear the sound of low voices.
It shut, and I was left alone again.
For twenty minutes I sat there, wondering what I was to do
next. I was still perfectly convinced that I was wanted, but when or
how I had no notion. I kept looking at my watch, and as the time
crept on to half-past ten I began to think that the conference must
soon end. In a quarter of an hour Royer should be speeding along
the road to Portsmouth ...
Then I heard a bell ring, and the butler appeared. The door of
the back room opened, and the First Sea Lord came out. He walked
past me, and in passing he glanced in my direction, and for a
second we looked each other in the face.
Only for a second, but it was enough to make my heart jump. I
had never seen the great man before, and he had never seen me.
But in that fraction of time something sprang into his eyes, and that
something was recognition. You can't mistake it. It is a flicker, a
spark of light, a minute shade of difference which means one thing
and one thing only. It came involuntarily, for in a moment it died,
and he passed on. In a maze of wild fancies I heard the street door
close behind him.
I picked up the telephone book and looked up the number of his
house. We were connected at once, and I heard a servant's voice.
'Is his Lordship at home?' I asked.
'His Lordship returned half an hour ago,' said the voice, 'and has
gone to bed. He is not very well tonight. Will you leave a
message, Sir?'
I rang off and almost tumbled into a chair. My part in this
business was not yet ended. It had been a close shave, but I had
been in time.
Not a moment could be lost, so I marched boldly to the door of
that back room and entered without knocking.
Five surprised faces looked up from a round table. There was
Sir Walter, and Drew the War Minister, whom I knew from his
photographs. There was a slim elderly man, who was probably
Whittaker, the Admiralty official, and there was General WinStanley,
conspicuous from the long scar on his forehead. Lastly,
there was a short stout man with an iron-grey moustache and
bushy eyebrows, who had been arrested in the middle of a sentence.
Sir Walter's face showed surprise and annoyance.
'This is Mr Hannay, of whom I have spoken to you,' he said
apologetically to the company. 'I'm afraid, Hannay, this visit
is ill-timed.'
I was getting back my coolness. 'That remains to be seen, Sir,' I
said; 'but I think it may be in the nick of time. For God's sake,
gentlemen, tell me who went out a minute ago?'
'Lord Alloa,' Sir Walter said, reddening with anger.
'It was not,' I cried; 'it was his living image, but it was not Lord
Alloa. It was someone who recognized me, someone I have seen in
the last month. He had scarcely left the doorstep when I rang up
Lord Alloa's house and was told he had come in half an hour
before and had gone to bed.'
'Who - who -' someone stammered.
'The Black Stone,' I cried, and I sat down in the chair so recently
vacated and looked round at five badly scared gentlemen.
CHAPTER NINE
The Thirty-Nine Steps
'Nonsense!' said the official from the Admiralty.
Sir Walter got up and left the room while we looked blankly at
the table. He came back in ten minutes with a long face. 'I have
spoken to Alloa,' he said. 'Had him out of bed - very grumpy. He
went straight home after Mulross's dinner.'
'But it's madness,' broke in General Winstanley. 'Do you mean
to tell me that that man came here and sat beside me for the best
part of half an hour and that I didn't detect the imposture? Alloa
must be out of his mind.'
'Don't you see the cleverness of it?' I said. 'You were too
interested in other things to have any eyes. You took Lord Alloa for
granted. If it had been anybody else you might have looked more
closely, but it was natural for him to be here, and that put you all
to sleep.'
Then the Frenchman spoke, very slowly and in good English.
'The young man is right. His psychology is good. Our enemies
have not been foolish!'
He bent his wise brows on the assembly.
'I will tell you a tale,' he said. 'It happened many years ago in
Senegal. I was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time
used to go fishing for big barbel in the river. A little Arab mare
used to carry my luncheon basket - one of the salted dun breed you
got at Timbuctoo in the old days. Well, one morning I had good
sport, and the mare was unaccountably restless. I could hear her
whinnying and squealing and stamping her feet, and I kept soothing
her with my voice while my mind was intent on fish. I could see
her all the time, as I thought, out of a corner of my eye, tethered
to a tree twenty yards away. After a couple of hours I began to
think of food. I collected my fish in a tarpaulin bag, and moved
down the stream towards the mare, trolling my line. When I got up
to her I flung the tarpaulin on her back -'
He paused and looked round.
'It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and
found myself looking at a lion three feet off ... An old man-eater,
that was the terror of the village ... What was left of the mare, a
mass of blood and bones and hide, was behind him.'
'What happened?' I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a
true yarn when I heard it.
'I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also
my servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.'
He held up a hand which lacked three fingers.
'Consider,' he said. 'The mare had been dead more than an hour,
and the brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never
saw the kill, for I was accustomed to the mare's fretting, and I
never marked her absence, for my consciousness of her was only of
something tawny, and the lion filled that part. If I could blunder
thus, gentlemen, in a land where men's senses are keen, why should
we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?'
Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.
'But I don't see,' went on Winstanley. 'Their object was to get
these dispositions without our knowing it. Now it only required
one of us to mention to Alloa our meeting tonight for the whole
fraud to be exposed.'
Sir Walter laughed dryly. 'The selection of Alloa shows their
acumen. Which of us was likely to speak to him about tonight? Or
was he likely to open the subject?'
I remembered the First Sea Lord's reputation for taciturnity and
shortness of temper.
'The one thing that puzzles me,' said the General, 'is what good
his visit here would do that spy fellow? He could not carry away
several pages of figures and strange names in his head.'
'That is not difficult,' the Frenchman replied. 'A good spy is
trained to have a photographic memory. Like your own Macaulay.
You noticed he said nothing, but went through these papers again
and again. I think we may assume that he has every detail stamped
on his mind. When I was younger I could do the same trick.'
'Well, I suppose there is nothing for it but to change the plans,'
said Sir Walter ruefully.
Whittaker was looking very glum. 'Did you tell Lord Alloa what
has happened?' he asked. 'No? Well, I can't speak with absolute
assurance, but I'm nearly certain we can't make any serious change
unless we alter the geography of England.'
'Another thing must be said,' it was Royer who spoke. 'I talked
freely when that man was here. I told something of the military
plans of my Government. I was permitted to say so much. But that
information would be worth many millions to our enemies. No, my
friends, I see no other way. The man who came here and his
confederates must be taken, and taken at once.'
'Good God,' I cried, 'and we have not a rag of a clue.'
'Besides,' said Whittaker, 'there is the post. By this time the news
will be on its way.'
'No,' said the Frenchman. 'You do not understand the habits
of the spy. He receives personally his reward, and he delivers
personally his intelligence. We in France know something of the
breed. There is still a chance, MES AMIS. These men must cross
the sea, and there are ships to be searched and ports to be
watched. Believe me, the need is desperate for both France and Britain.'
Royer's grave good sense seemed to pull us together. He was the
man of action among fumblers. But I saw no hope in any face, and
I felt none. Where among the fifty millions of these islands and
within a dozen hours were we to lay hands on the three cleverest
rogues in Europe?
Then suddenly I had an inspiration.
'Where is Scudder's book?' I cried to Sir Walter. 'Quick, man, I
remember something in it.'
He unlocked the door of a bureau and gave it to me.
I found the place. THIRTY-NINE STEPS, I read, and again, THIRTY-NINE
STEPS - I COUNTED THEM - HIGH TIDE 10.17 P.M.
The Admiralty man was looking at me as if he thought I had
gone mad.
'Don't you see it's a clue,' I shouted. 'Scudder knew where these
fellows laired - he knew where they were going to leave the
country, though he kept the name to himself. Tomorrow was the
day, and it was some place where high tide was at 10.17.'
'They may have gone tonight,' someone said.
'Not they. They have their own snug secret way, and they won't
be hurried. I know Germans, and they are mad about working to a
plan. Where the devil can I get a book of Tide Tables?'
Whittaker brightened up. 'It's a chance,' he said. 'Let's go over
to the Admiralty.'
We got into two of the waiting motor-cars - all but Sir Walter,
who went off to Scotland Yard - to 'mobilize MacGillivray', so he said.
We marched through empty corridors and big bare chambers
where the charwomen were busy, till we reached a little room lined
with books and maps. A resident clerk was unearthed, who
presently fetched from the library the Admiralty Tide Tables. I sat
at the desk and the others stood round, for somehow or other I had
got charge of this expedition.
It was no good. There were hundreds of entries, and so far as I
could see 10.17 might cover fifty places. We had to find some way
of narrowing the possibilities.
I took my head in my hands and thought. There must be some
way of reading this riddle. What did Scudder mean by steps? I
thought of dock steps, but if he had meant that I didn't think he
would have mentioned the number. It must be some place where
there were several staircases, and one marked out from the others
by having thirty-nine steps.
Then I had a sudden thought, and hunted up all the steamer
sailings. There was no boat which left for the Continent at 10.17 p.m.
Why was high tide so important? If it was a harbour it must be
some little place where the tide mattered, or else it was a heavy-
draught boat. But there was no regular steamer sailing at that hour,
and somehow I didn't think they would travel by a big boat from a
regular harbour. So it must be some little harbour where the tide
was important, or perhaps no harbour at all.
But if it was a little port I couldn't see what the steps signified.
There were no sets of staircases on any harbour that I had ever
seen. It must be some place which a particular staircase identified,
and where the tide was full at 10.17. On the whole it seemed to me
that the place must be a bit of open coast. But the staircases kept
puzzling me.
Then I went back to wider considerations. Whereabouts would a
man be likely to leave for Germany, a man in a hurry, who wanted
a speedy and a secret passage? Not from any of the big harbours.
And not from the Channel or the West Coast or Scotland, for,
remember, he was starting from London. I measured the distance
on the map, and tried to put myself in the enemy's shoes. I
should try for Ostend or Antwerp or Rotterdam, and I should
sail from somewhere on the East Coast between Cromer and Dover.
All this was very loose guessing, and I don't pretend it was
ingenious or scientific. I wasn't any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I
have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like
this. I don't know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my
brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I
guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.
So I set out all my conclusions on a bit of Admiralty paper. They
ran like this:
FAIRLY CERTAIN
(1) Place where there are several sets of stairs; one that
matters distinguished by having thirty-nine steps.
(2) Full tide at 10.17 p.m. Leaving shore only possible at full
tide.
(3) Steps not dock steps, and so place probably not harbour.
(4) No regular night steamer at 10.17. Means of transport must
be tramp (unlikely), yacht, or fishing-boat.
There my reasoning stopped. I made another list, which I headed
'Guessed', but I was just as sure of the one as the other.
GUESSED
(1) Place not harbour but open coast.
(2) Boat small - trawler, yacht, or launch.
(3) Place somewhere on East Coast between Cromer and Dover.
it struck me as odd that I should be sitting at that desk with a
Cabinet Minister, a Field-Marshal, two high Government officials,
and a French General watching me, while from the scribble of a
dead man I was trying to drag a secret which meant life or death
for us.
Sir Walter had joined us, and presently MacGillivray arrived. He
had sent out instructions to watch the ports and railway stations for
the three men whom I had described to Sir Walter. Not that he or
anybody else thought that that would do much good.
'Here's the most I can make of it,' I said. 'We have got to find a
place where there are several staircases down to the beach, one of
which has thirty-nine steps. I think it's a piece of open coast with
biggish cliffs, somewhere between the Wash and the Channel. Also
it's a place where full tide is at 10.17 tomorrow night.'
Then an idea struck me. 'Is there no Inspector of Coastguards or
some fellow like that who knows the East Coast?'
Whittaker said there was, and that he lived in Clapham. He went
off in a car to fetch him, and the rest of us sat about the little room
and talked of anything that came into our heads. I lit a pipe and
went over the whole thing again till my brain grew weary.
About one in the morning the coastguard man arrived. He was a
fine old fellow, with the look of a naval officer, and was desperately
respectful to the company. I left the War Minister to cross-examine
him, for I felt he would think it cheek in me to talk.
'We want you to tell us the places you know on the East Coast
where there are cliffs, and where several sets of steps run down to
the beach.'
He thought for a bit. 'What kind of steps do you mean, Sir?
There are plenty of places with roads cut down through the cliffs,
and most roads have a step or two in them. Or do you mean
regular staircases - all steps, so to speak?'
Sir Arthur looked towards me. 'We mean regular staircases,' I said.
He reflected a minute or two. 'I don't know that I can think of
any. Wait a second. There's a place in Norfolk - Brattlesham -
beside a golf-course, where there are a couple of staircases, to let the
gentlemen get a lost ball.'
'That's not it,' I said.
'Then there are plenty of Marine Parades, if that's what you
mean. Every seaside resort has them.'
I shook my head.
'It's got to be more retired than that,' I said.
'Well, gentlemen, I can't think of anywhere else. Of course,
there's the Ruff -'
'What's that?' I asked.
'The big chalk headland in Kent, close to Bradgate. It's got a lot
of villas on the top, and some of the houses have staircases down to
a private beach. It's a very high-toned sort of place, and the residents
there like to keep by themselves.'
I tore open the Tide Tables and found Bradgate. High tide there
was at 10.17 P.m. on the 15th of June.
'We're on the scent at last,' I cried excitedly. 'How can I find out
what is the tide at the Ruff?'
'I can tell you that, Sir,' said the coastguard man. 'I once was lent
a house there in this very month, and I used to go out at night to
the deep-sea fishing. The tide's ten minutes before Bradgate.'
I closed the book and looked round at the company.
'If one of those staircases has thirty-nine steps we have solved
the mystery, gentlemen,' I said. 'I want the loan of your car, Sir
Walter, and a map of the roads. If Mr MacGillivray will spare me
ten minutes, I think we can prepare something for tomorrow.'
It was ridiculous in me to take charge of the business like this,
but they didn't seem to mind, and after all I had been in the show
from the start. Besides, I was used to rough jobs, and these eminent
gentlemen were too clever not to see it. It was General Royer who
gave me my commission. 'I for one,' he said, 'am content to leave
the matter in Mr Hannay's hands.'
By half-past three I was tearing past the moonlit hedgerows of
Kent, with MacGillivray's best man on the seat beside me.
CHAPTER TEN
Various Parties Converging on the Sea
A pink and blue June morning found me at Bradgate looking from
the Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the Cock
sands which seemed the size of a bell-buoy. A couple of miles
farther south and much nearer the shore a small destroyer was
anchored. Scaife, MacGillivray's man, who had been in the Navy,
knew the boat, and told me her name and her commander's, so I
sent off a wire to Sir Walter.
After breakfast Scaife got from a house-agent a key for the gates
of the staircases on the Ruff. I walked with him along the sands,
and sat down in a nook of the cliffs while he investigated the half-
dozen of them. I didn't want to be seen, but the place at this hour
was quite deserted, and all the time I was on that beach I saw
nothing but the sea-gulls.
It took him more than an hour to do the job, and when I saw
him coming towards me, conning a bit of paper, I can tell you my
heart was in my mouth. Everything depended, you see, on my
guess proving right.
He read aloud the number of steps in the different stairs. 'Thirty-
four, thirty-five, thirty-nine, forty-two, forty-seven,' and 'twenty-
one' where the cliffs grew lower. I almost got up and shouted.
We hurried back to the town and sent a wire to MacGillivray. I
wanted half a dozen men, and I directed them to divide themselves
among different specified hotels. Then Scaife set out to prospect
the house at the head of the thirty-nine steps.
He came back with news that both puzzled and reassured me.
The house was called Trafalgar Lodge, and belonged to an old
gentleman called Appleton - a retired stockbroker, the house-agent
said. Mr Appleton was there a good deal in the summer time, and
was in residence now - had been for the better part of a week.
Scaife could pick up very little information about him, except that
he was a decent old fellow, who paid his bills regularly, and was
always good for a fiver for a local charity. Then Scaife seemed to
have penetrated to the back door of the house, pretending he was
an agent for sewing-machines. Only three servants were kept, a
cook, a parlour-maid, and a housemaid, and they were just the sort
that you would find in a respectable middle-class household. The
cook was not the gossiping kind, and had pretty soon shut the door
in his face, but Scaife said he was positive she knew nothing. Next
door there was a new house building which would give good cover
for observation, and the villa on the other side was to let, and its
garden was rough and shrubby.
I borrowed Scaife's telescope, and before lunch went for a walk
along the Ruff. I kept well behind the rows of villas, and found a
good observation point on the edge of the golf-course. There I had
a view of the line of turf along the cliff top, with seats placed at
intervals, and the little square plots, railed in and planted with
bushes, whence the staircases descended to the beach. I saw Trafalgar
Lodge very plainly, a red-brick villa with a veranda, a tennis
lawn behind, and in front the ordinary seaside flower-garden full of
marguerites and scraggy geraniums. There was a flagstaff from
which an enormous Union Jack hung limply in the still air.
Presently I observed someone leave the house and saunter along
the cliff. When I got my glasses on him I saw it was an old man,
wearing white flannel trousers, a blue serge jacket, and a straw hat.
He carried field-glasses and a newspaper, and sat down on one of
the iron seats and began to read. Sometimes he would lay down the
paper and turn his glasses on the sea. He looked for a long time at
the destroyer. I watched him for half an hour, till he got up and
went back to the house for his luncheon, when I returned to the
hotel for mine.
I wasn't feeling very confident. This decent common-place dwelling
was not what I had expected. The man might be the bald
archaeologist of that horrible moorland farm, or he might not. He
was exactly the kind of satisfied old bird you will find in every
suburb and every holiday place. If you wanted a type of the perfectly
harmless person you would probably pitch on that.
But after lunch, as I sat in the hotel porch, I perked up, for I saw
the thing I had hoped for and had dreaded to miss. A yacht came
up from the south and dropped anchor pretty well opposite the
Ruff. She seemed about a hundred and fifty tons, and I saw she
belonged to the Squadron from the white ensign. So Scaife and I
went down to the harbour and hired a boatman for an afternoon's fishing.
I spent a warm and peaceful afternoon. We caught between us
about twenty pounds of cod and lythe, and out in that dancing blue
sea I took a cheerier view of things. Above the white cliffs of the
Ruff I saw the green and red of the villas, and especially the great
flagstaff of Trafalgar Lodge. About four o'clock, when we had
fished enough, I made the boatman row us round the yacht, which
lay like a delicate white bird, ready at a moment to flee. Scaife said
she must be a fast boat for her build, and that she was pretty
heavily engined.
Her name was the ARIADNE, as I discovered from the cap of one of
the men who was polishing brasswork. I spoke to him, and got an
answer in the soft dialect of Essex. Another hand that came along
passed me the time of day in an unmistakable English tongue. Our
boatman had an argument with one of them about the weather, and
for a few minutes we lay on our oars close to the starboard bow.
Then the men suddenly disregarded us and bent their heads to
their work as an officer came along the deck. He was a pleasant,
clean-looking young fellow, and he put a question to us about our
fishing in very good English. But there could be no doubt about
him. His close-cropped head and the cut of his collar and tie never
came out of England.
That did something to reassure me, but as we rowed back to
Bradgate my obstinate doubts would not be dismissed. The thing that
worried me was the reflection that my enemies knew that I had got my
knowledge from Scudder, and it was Scudder who had given me the
clue to this place. If they knew that Scudder had this clue, would they
not be certain to change their plans? Too much depended on their
success for them to take any risks. The whole question was how much
they understood about Scudder's knowledge. I had talked confidently
last night about Germans always sticking to a scheme, but if they had
any suspicions that I was on their track they would be fools not to
cover it. I wondered if the man last night had seen that I recognized
him. Somehow I did not think he had, and to that I had clung. But the
whole business had never seemed so difficult as that afternoon when
by all calculations I should have been rejoicing in assured success.
In the hotel I met the commander of the destroyer, to whom
Scaife introduced me, and with whom I had a few words. Then I
thought I would put in an hour or two watching Trafalgar Lodge.
I found a place farther up the hill, in the garden of an empty
house. From there I had a full view of the court, on which two
figures were having a game of tennis. One was the old man, whom
I had already seen; the other was a younger fellow, wearing some
club colours in the scarf round his middle. They played with tremendous
zest, like two city gents who wanted hard exercise to open
their pores. You couldn't conceive a more innocent spectacle. They
shouted and laughed and stopped for drinks, when a maid brought
out two tankards on a salver. I rubbed my eyes and asked myself if
I was not the most immortal fool on earth. Mystery and darkness
had hung about the men who hunted me over the Scotch moor in
aeroplane and motor-car, and notably about that infernal antiquarian.
It was easy enough to connect those folk with the knife
that pinned Scudder to the floor, and with fell designs on the
world's peace. But here were two guileless citizens taking their
innocuous exercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum
dinner, where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket
scores and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been making a
net to catch vultures and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump
thrushes had blundered into it.
Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a
bag of golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis
lawn and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they
were chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then
the plump man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced
that he must have a tub. I heard his very words - 'I've got into
a proper lather,' he said. 'This will bring down my weight and
my handicap, Bob. I'll take you on tomorrow and give you a stroke a
hole.' You couldn't find anything much more English than that.
They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot.
I had been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might
be acting; but if they were, where was their audience? They didn't
know I was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply
impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything
but what they seemed - three ordinary, game-playing, suburban
Englishmen, wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.
And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was
plump, and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with
Scudder's notes; and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at
least one German officer. I thought of Karolides lying dead and all
Europe trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had
left behind me in London who were waiting anxiously for the
events of the next hours. There was no doubt that hell was afoot
somewhere. The Black Stone had won, and if it survived this June
night would bank its winnings.
There seemed only one thing to do - go forward as if I had no
doubts, and if I was going to make a fool of myself to do it
handsomely. Never in my life have I faced a job with greater
disinclination. I would rather in my then mind have walked into a
den of anarchists, each with his Browning handy, or faced a charging
lion with a popgun, than enter that happy home of three
cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their game was up. How
they would laugh at me!
But suddenly I remembered a thing I once heard in Rhodesia
from old Peter Pienaar. I have quoted Peter already in this narrative.
He was the best scout I ever knew, and before he had turned
respectable he had been pretty often on the windy side of the law,
when he had been wanted badly by the authorities. Peter once
discussed with me the question of disguises, and he had a theory
which struck me at the time. He said, barring absolute certainties
like fingerprints, mere physical traits were very little use for
identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed at
things like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The
only thing that mattered was what Peter called 'atmosphere'.
If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from
those in which he had been first observed, and - this is the important
part - really play up to these surroundings and behave as if
he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest
detectives on earth. And he used to tell a story of how he once
borrowed a black coat and went to church and shared the same
hymn-book with the man that was looking for him. If that man had
seen him in decent company before he would have recognized him;
but he had only seen him snuffing the lights in a public-house with
a revolver.
The recollection of Peter's talk gave me the first real comfort
that I had had that day. Peter had been a wise old bird, and these
fellows I was after were about the pick of the aviary. What if they
were playing Peter's game? A fool tries to look different: a clever
man looks the same and is different.
Again, there was that other maxim of Peter's which had helped
me when I had been a roadman. 'If you are playing a part, you
will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are
it.' That would explain the game of tennis. Those chaps didn't
need to act, they just turned a handle and passed into another
life, which came as naturally to them as the first. It sounds a
platitude, but Peter used to say that it was the big secret of all
the famous criminals.
It was now getting on for eight o'clock, and I went back and
saw Scaife to give him his instructions. I arranged with him how to
place his men, and then I went for a walk, for I didn't feel up to
any dinner. I went round the deserted golf-course, and then to a
point on the cliffs farther north beyond the line of the villas.
On the little trim newly-made roads I met people in flannels
coming back from tennis and the beach, and a coastguard from the
wireless station, and donkeys and pierrots padding homewards.
Out at sea in the blue dusk I saw lights appear on the ARIADNE and
on the destroyer away to the south, and beyond the Cock sands the
bigger lights of steamers making for the Thames. The whole scene
was so peaceful and ordinary that I got more dashed in spirits every
second. It took all my resolution to stroll towards Trafalgar Lodge
about half-past nine.
On the way I got a piece of solid comfort from the sight of a
greyhound that was swinging along at a nursemaid's heels. He
reminded me of a dog I used to have in Rhodesia, and of the time
when I took him hunting with me in the Pali hills. We were after
rhebok, the dun kind, and I recollected how we had followed one
beast, and both he and I had clean lost it. A greyhound works by
sight, and my eyes are good enough, but that buck simply leaked
out of the landscape. Afterwards I found out how it managed it.
Against the grey rock of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow
against a thundercloud. It didn't need to run away; all it had to do
was to stand still and melt into the background.
Suddenly as these memories chased across my brain I thought of
my present case and applied the moral. The Black Stone didn't need
to bolt. They were quietly absorbed into the landscape. I was on
the right track, and I jammed that down in my mind and vowed
never to forget it. The last word was with Peter Pienaar.
Scaife's men would be posted now, but there was no sign of a
soul. The house stood as open as a market-place for anybody to
observe. A three-foot railing separated it from the cliff road; the
windows on the ground-floor were all open, and shaded lights and
the low sound of voices revealed where the occupants were finishing
dinner. Everything was as public and above-board as a charity
bazaar. Feeling the greatest fool on earth, I opened the gate and
rang the bell.
A man of my sort, who has travelled about the world in rough
places, gets on perfectly well with two classes, what you may call
the upper and the lower. He understands them and they understand
him. I was at home with herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was
sufficiently at my ease with people like Sir Walter and the men I
had met the night before. I can't explain why, but it is a fact. But
what fellows like me don't understand is the great comfortable,
satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs.
He doesn't know how they look at things, he doesn't understand
their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba.
When a trim parlour-maid opened the door, I could hardly find my voice.
I asked for Mr Appleton, and was ushered in. My plan had been
to walk straight into the dining-room, and by a sudden appearance
wake in the men that start of recognition which would confirm my
theory. But when I found myself in that neat hall the place mastered
me. There were the golf-clubs and tennis-rackets, the straw hats
and caps, the rows of gloves, the sheaf of walking-sticks, which
you will find in ten thousand British homes. A stack of neatly
folded coats and waterproofs covered the top of an old oak chest;
there was a grandfather clock ticking; and some polished brass
warming-pans on the walls, and a barometer, and a print of Chiltern
winning the St Leger. The place was as orthodox as an Anglican
church. When the maid asked me for my name I gave it automatically,
and was shown into the smoking-room, on the right side
of the hall.
That room was even worse. I hadn't time to examine it, but I
could see some framed group photographs above the mantelpiece,
and I could have sworn they were English public school or college.
I had only one glance, for I managed to pull myself together and go
after the maid. But I was too late. She had already entered the
dining-room and given my name to her master, and I had missed the
chance of seeing how the three took it.
When I walked into the room the old man at the head of the
table had risen and turned round to meet me. He was in evening
dress - a short coat and black tie, as was the other, whom I called
in my own mind the plump one. The third, the dark fellow, wore a
blue serge suit and a soft white collar, and the colours of some club
or school.
The old man's manner was perfect. 'Mr Hannay?' he said
hesitatingly. 'Did you wish to see me? One moment, you fellows, and I'll
rejoin you. We had better go to the smoking-room.'
Though I hadn't an ounce of confidence in me, I forced myself
to play the game. I pulled up a chair and sat down on it.
'I think we have met before,' I said, 'and I guess you know
my business.'
The light in the room was dim, but so far as I could see their
faces, they played the part of mystification very well.
'Maybe, maybe,' said the old man. 'I haven't a very good memory,
but I'm afraid you must tell me your errand, Sir, for I really don't
know it.'
'Well, then,' I said, and all the time I seemed to myself to be
talking pure foolishness - 'I have come to tell you that the game's
up. I have a warrant for the arrest of you three gentlemen.'
'Arrest,' said the old man, and he looked really shocked. 'Arrest!
Good God, what for?'
'For the murder of Franklin Scudder in London on the 23rd day
of last month.'
'I never heard the name before,' said the old man in a dazed voice.
One of the others spoke up. 'That was the Portland Place murder.
I read about it. Good heavens, you must be mad, Sir! Where do you
come from?'
'Scotland Yard,' I said.
After that for a minute there was utter silence. The old man was
staring at his plate and fumbling with a nut, the very model of
innocent bewilderment.
Then the plump one spoke up. He stammered a little, like a man
picking his words.
'Don't get flustered, uncle,' he said. 'It is all a ridiculous mistake;
but these things happen sometimes, and we can easily set it right. It
won't be hard to prove our innocence. I can show that I was out of
the country on the 23rd of May, and Bob was in a nursing home.
You were in London, but you can explain what you were doing.'
'Right, Percy! Of course that's easy enough. The 23rd! That was
the day after Agatha's wedding. Let me see. What was I doing? I
came up in the morning from Woking, and lunched at the club with
Charlie Symons. Then - oh yes, I dined with the Fishmongers. I
remember, for the punch didn't agree with me, and I was seedy next
morning. Hang it all, there's the cigar-box I brought back from the
dinner.' He pointed to an object on the table, and laughed nervously.
'I think, Sir,' said the young man, addressing me respectfully,
'you will see you are mistaken. We want to assist the law like all
Englishmen, and we don't want Scotland Yard to be making fools
of themselves. That's so, uncle?'
'Certainly, Bob.' The old fellow seemed to be recovering his
voice. 'Certainly, we'll do anything in our power to assist the
authorities. But - but this is a bit too much. I can't get over it.'
'How Nellie will chuckle,' said the plump man. 'She always said
that you would die of boredom because nothing ever happened to
you. And now you've got it thick and strong,' and he began to
laugh very pleasantly.
'By Jove, yes. just think of it! What a story to tell at the club.
Really, Mr Hannay, I suppose I should be angry, to show my
innocence, but it's too funny! I almost forgive you the fright you
gave me! You looked so glum, I thought I might have been walking
in my sleep and killing people.'
It couldn't be acting, it was too confoundedly genuine. My heart
went into my boots, and my first impulse was to apologize and
clear out. But I told myself I must see it through, even though I
was to be the laughing-stock of Britain. The light from the dinner-
table candlesticks was not very good, and to cover my confusion I
got up, walked to the door and switched on the electric light. The
sudden glare made them blink, and I stood scanning the three faces.
Well, I made nothing of it. One was old and bald, one was stout,
one was dark and thin. There was nothing in their appearance to
prevent them being the three who had hunted me in Scotland, but
there was nothing to identify them. 1 simply can't explain why I
who, as a roadman, had looked into two pairs of eyes, and as Ned
Ainslie into another pair, why I, who have a good memory and
reasonable powers of observation, could find no satisfaction. They
seemed exactly what they professed to be, and I could not have
sworn to one of them.
There in that pleasant dining-room, with etchings on the walls,
and a picture of an old lady in a bib above the mantelpiece, I could
see nothing to connect them with the moorland desperadoes. There
was a silver cigarette-box beside me, and I saw that it had been won
by Percival Appleton, Esq., of the St Bede's Club, in a golf tournament.
I had to keep a firm hold of Peter Pienaar to prevent myself
bolting out of that house.
'Well,' said the old man politely, 'are you reassured by your
scrutiny, Sir?'
I couldn't find a word.
'I hope you'll find it consistent with your duty to drop this
ridiculous business. I make no complaint, but you'll see how annoying
it must be to respectable people.'
I shook my head.
'O Lord,' said the young man. 'This is a bit too thick!'
'Do you propose to march us off to the police station?' asked the
plump one. 'That might be the best way out of it, but I suppose
you won't be content with the local branch. I have the right to ask
to see your warrant, but I don't wish to cast any aspersions upon
you. You are only doing your duty. But you'll admit it's horribly
awkward. What do you propose to do?'
There was nothing to do except to call in my men and have them
arrested, or to confess my blunder and clear out. I felt mesmerized by
the whole place, by the air of obvious innocence - not innocence
merely, but frank honest bewilderment and concern in the three faces.
'Oh, Peter Pienaar,' I groaned inwardly, and for a moment I was
very near damning myself for a fool and asking their pardon.
'Meantime I vote we have a game of bridge,' said the plump one.
'It will give Mr Hannay time to think over things, and you know
we have been wanting a fourth player. Do you play, Sir?'
I accepted as if it had been an ordinary invitation at the club.
The whole business had mesmerized me. We went into the
smoking-room where a card-table was set out, and I was offered
things to smoke and drink. I took my place at the table in a kind of
dream. The window was open and the moon was flooding the cliffs
and sea with a great tide of yellow light. There was moonshine,
too, in my head. The three had recovered their composure, and
were talking easily - just the kind of slangy talk you will hear in
any golf club-house. I must have cut a rum figure, sitting there
knitting my brows with my eyes wandering.
My partner was the young dark one. I play a fair hand at bridge,
but I must have been rank bad that night. They saw that they had
got me puzzled, and that put them more than ever at their ease. I
kept looking at their faces, but they conveyed nothing to me. It
was not that they looked different; they were different. I clung
desperately to the words of Peter Pienaar.
Then something awoke me.
The old man laid down his hand to light a cigar. He didn't pick
it up at once, but sat back for a moment in his chair, with his
fingers tapping on his knees.
It was the movement I remembered when I had stood before him
in the moorland farm, with the pistols of his servants behind me.
A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand
to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and
missed it. But I didn't, and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some
shadow lifted from my brain, and I was looking at the three men
with full and absolute recognition.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o'clock.
The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their
secrets. The young one was the murderer. Now I saw cruelty and
ruthlessness, where before I had only seen good-humour. His knife,
I made certain, had skewered Scudder to the floor. His kind had
put the bullet in Karolides.
The plump man's features seemed to dislimn, and form again, as
I looked at them. He hadn't a face, only a hundred masks that he
could assume when he pleased. That chap must have been a superb
actor. Perhaps he had been Lord Alloa of the night before; perhaps
not; it didn't matter. I wondered if he was the fellow who had first
tracked Scudder, and left his card on him. Scudder had said he
lisped, and I could imagine how the adoption of a lisp might add terror.
But the old man was the pick of the lot. He was sheer brain, icy,
cool, calculating, as ruthless as a steam hammer. Now that my eyes
were opened I wondered where I had seen the benevolence. His
jaw was like chilled steel, and his eyes had the inhuman luminosity
of a bird's. I went on playing, and every second a greater hate
welled up in my heart. It almost choked me, and I couldn't answer
when my partner spoke. Only a little longer could I endure
their company.
'Whew! Bob! Look at the time,' said the old man. 'You'd better
think about catching your train. Bob's got to go to town tonight,'
he added, turning to me. The voice rang now as false as hell.
I looked at the clock, and it was nearly half-past ten.
'I am afraid he must put off his journey,' I said.
'Oh, damn,' said the young man. 'I thought you had dropped
that rot. I've simply got to go. You can have my address, and I'll
give any security you like.'
'No,' I said, 'you must stay.'
At that I think they must have realized that the game was desperate.
Their only chance had been to convince me that I was playing
the fool, and that had failed. But the old man spoke again.
'I'll go bail for my nephew. That ought to content you, Mr
Hannay.' Was it fancy, or did I detect some halt in the smoothness
of that voice?
There must have been, for as I glanced at him, his eyelids fell in
that hawk-like hood which fear had stamped on my memory.
I blew my whistle.
In an instant the lights were out. A pair of strong arms gripped
me round the waist, covering the pockets in which a man might be
expected to carry a pistol.
'SCHNELL, FRANZ,' cried a voice, 'DAS BOOT, DAS BOOT!' As it spoke I
saw two of my fellows emerge on the moonlit lawn.
The young dark man leapt for the window, was through it, and
over the low fence before a hand could touch him. I grappled the
old chap, and the room seemed to fill with figures. I saw the plump
one collared, but my eyes were all for the out-of-doors, where
Franz sped on over the road towards the railed entrance to the
beach stairs. One man followed him, but he had no chance. The
gate of the stairs locked behind the fugitive, and I stood staring,
with my hands on the old boy's throat, for such a time as a man
might take to descend those steps to the sea.
Suddenly my prisoner broke from me and flung himself on the
wall. There was a click as if a lever had been pulled. Then came a
low rumbling far, far below the ground, and through the window I
saw a cloud of chalky dust pouring out of the shaft of the stairway.
Someone switched on the light.
The old man was looking at me with blazing eyes.
'He is safe,' he cried. 'You cannot follow in time ... He is
gone ... He has triumphed ... DER SCHWARZE STEIN IST IN DER
SIEGESKRONE.'
There was more in those eyes than any common triumph. They
had been hooded like a bird of prey, and now they flamed with a
hawk's pride. A white fanatic heat burned in them, and I realized
for the first time the terrible thing I had been up against. This man
was more than a spy; in his foul way he had been a patriot.
As the handcuffs clinked on his wrists I said my last word to him.
'I hope Franz will bear his triumph well. I ought to tell you that
the ARIADNE for the last hour has been in our hands.'
Three weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined
the New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience
got a captain's commission straight off. But I had done my best
service, I think, before I put on khaki.
****End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Thirty-nine Steps****