John Buchan, 1875 - 1940 ( here - circa 1936 )
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 theaters 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
whiskey.
'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 pijamas, 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 in spanned 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
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.
I had a solemn time traveling 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 traveled 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 flavored with whiskey, 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 humor 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 better 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 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.
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.
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.
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 ?'
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.
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.
'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.'
'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.
'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 in curiously 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.