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Title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

Author: John Buchan

Release date: June 1, 1996 [eBook #558]

Most recently updated: April 7, 2021

Language: English

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THIRTY-

NINE STEPS ***
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
 Contents

Chapter I The Man Who Died

Chapter II The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
Chapter III The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
Chapter IV The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
Chapter V The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
Chapter VI The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
Chapter VII The Dry-Fly Fisherman
Chapter VIII The Coming of the Black Stone
Chapter IX The Thirty-Nine Steps
Chapter X Various Parties Converging on the Sea
 TO
THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON
(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)

My Dear Tommy,

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental

type of tale which Americans call the “dime novel” and
which we know as the “shocker”—the romance where the
incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the
borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I
exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was
driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the
result, and I should like to put your name on it in memory of
our long friendship, in the days when the wildest fictions are
so much less improbable than the facts.

J.B.

Sept. 1915
 Chapter I.
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 Buluwayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but
good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying
myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I
had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me,
and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days.
But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I was tired
of seeing sights, and in less than a month I had had enough of restaurants
and theatres and race-meetings. I had no real pal to go about with, which
probably explains things. Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but
they didn’t seem much interested in me. They would fling me a question or
two about South Africa, and then get on to 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 Café 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 Tsar, 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 vitæ,” 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 Leipsig. I completed my evidence ten days ago in
Paris. I can’t tell you the details now, for it’s something of a history. When I
was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business to disappear, and I
reached this city by a mighty queer circuit. I left Paris a dandified young
French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant. In
Norway I was an English student of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures,
but when I left Bergen I was a cinema-man with special ski films. And I
came here from Leith with a lot of pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to
put before the London newspapers. Till yesterday I thought I had muddied
my trail some, and was feeling pretty happy. Then....”
 The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some more
whisky.
“Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block. I used to stay
close in my room all day, and only slip out after dark for an hour or two. I
watched him for a bit from my window, and I thought I recognized him....
He came in and spoke to the porter.... When I came back from my walk last
night I found a card in my letter-box. It bore the name of the man I want
least to meet on God’s earth.”
I think that the look in my companion’s eyes, the sheer naked scare on his
face, completed my conviction of his honesty. My own voice sharpened a
bit as I asked him what he did next.
“I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring, and that there
was only one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers knew I was dead they
would go to sleep again.”
“How did you manage it?”
“I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad, and I got
myself up to look like death. That wasn’t difficult, for I’m no slouch at
disguises. Then I got a corpse—you can always get a body in London if you
know where to go for it. I fetched it back in a trunk on the top of a four-
wheeler, and I had to be assisted upstairs to my room. You see I had to pile
up some evidence for the inquest. I went to bed and got my man to mix me
a sleeping-draught, and then told him to clear out. He wanted to fetch a
doctor, but I swore some and said I couldn’t abide leeches. When I was left
alone I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size, and I judged had
perished from too much alcohol, so I put some spirits handy about the
place. The jaw was the weak point in the likeness, so I blew it away with a
revolver. I daresay there will be somebody tomorrow to swear to having
heard a shot, but there are no neighbours on my floor, and I guessed I could
risk it. So I left the body in bed dressed up in my pyjamas, with a revolver
lying on the bed-clothes and a considerable mess around. Then I got into a
suit of clothes I had kept waiting for emergencies. I didn’t dare to shave for
fear of leaving tracks, and besides, it wasn’t any kind of use my trying to
get into the streets. I had had you in my mind all day, and there seemed
nothing to do but to make an appeal to you. I watched from my window till
I saw you come home, and then slipped down the stair to meet you....
There, sir, I guess you know about as much as me of this business.”
 He sat blinking like an owl, fluttering with nerves and yet desperately
determined. By this time I was pretty well convinced that he was going
straight with me. It was the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my
time many steep tales which had turned out to be true, and I had made a
practice of judging the man rather than the story. If he had wanted to get a
location in my flat, and then cut my throat, he would have pitched a milder
yarn.
“Hand me your key,” I said, “and I’ll take a look at the corpse. Excuse
my caution, but I’m bound to verify a bit if I can.”
He shook his head mournfully. “I reckoned you’d ask for that, but I
haven’t got it. It’s on my chain on the dressing-table. I had to leave it
behind, for I couldn’t leave any clues to breed suspicions. The gentry who
are after me are pretty bright-eyed citizens. You’ll have to take me on trust
for the night, and tomorrow you’ll get proof of the corpse business right
enough.”
I thought for an instant or two. “Right. I’ll trust you for the night. I’ll
lock you into this room and keep the key. Just one word, Mr Scudder. I
believe you’re straight, but if so be you are not I should warn you that I’m a
handy man with a gun.”
“Sure,” he said, jumping up with some briskness. “I haven’t the privilege
of your name, sir, but let me tell you that you’re a white man. I’ll thank you
to lend me a razor.”
I took him into my bedroom and turned him loose. In half an hour’s time
a figure came out that I scarcely recognized. Only his gimlety, hungry eyes
were the same. He was shaved clean, his hair was parted in the middle, and
he had cut his eyebrows. Further, he carried himself as if he had been
drilled, and was the very model, even to the brown complexion, of some
British officer who had had a long spell in India. He had a monocle, too,
which he stuck in his eye, and every trace of the American had gone out of
his speech.
“My hat! Mr Scudder—” I stammered.
“Not Mr Scudder,” he corrected; “Captain Theophilus Digby, of the 40th
Gurkhas, presently home on leave. I’ll thank you to remember that, sir.”
I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own couch,
more cheerful than I had been for the past month. Things did happen
occasionally, even in this God-forgotten metropolis.

I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a

row at the smoking-room door. Paddock was a fellow I had done a good
turn to out on the Selakwe, and I had inspanned him as my servant as soon
as I got to England. He had about as much gift of the gab as a
hippopotamus, and was not a great hand at valeting, but I knew I could
count on his loyalty.
“Stop that row, Paddock,” I said. “There’s a friend of mine, Captain—
Captain” (I couldn’t remember the name) “dossing down in there. Get
breakfast for two and then come and speak to me.”
I told Paddock a fine story about how my friend was a great swell, with
his nerves pretty bad from overwork, who wanted absolute rest and
stillness. Nobody had got to know he was here, or he would be besieged by
communications from the India Office and the Prime Minister and his cure
would be ruined. I am bound to say Scudder played up splendidly when he
came to breakfast. He fixed Paddock with his eyeglass, just like a British
officer, asked him about the Boer War, and slung out at me a lot of stuff
about imaginary pals. Paddock couldn’t learn to call me “sir’, but he
“sirred’ Scudder as if his life depended on it.
I left him with the newspaper and a box of cigars, and went down to the
City till luncheon. When I got back the liftman 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 II.
The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels

I sat down in an armchair and felt very sick. That lasted for maybe five
minutes, and was succeeded by a fit of the horrors. The poor staring white
face on the floor was more than I could bear, and I managed to get a table-
cloth and cover it. Then I staggered to a cupboard, found the brandy and
swallowed several mouthfuls. I had seen men die violently before; indeed I
had killed a few myself in the Matabele War; but this cold-blooded indoor
business was different. Still I managed to pull myself together. I looked at
my watch, and saw that it was half-past ten.
An idea seized me, and I went over the flat with a small-tooth comb.
There was nobody there, nor any trace of anybody, but I shuttered and
bolted all the windows and put the chain on the door. By this time my wits
were coming back to me, and I could think again. It took me about an hour
to figure the thing out, and I did not hurry, for, unless the murderer came
back, I had till about six o’clock in the morning for my cogitations.
I was in the soup—that was pretty clear. Any shadow of a doubt I might
have had about the truth of Scudder’s tale was now gone. The proof of it
was lying under the table-cloth. The men who knew that he knew what he
knew had found him, and had taken the best way to make certain of his
silence. Yes; but he had been in my rooms four days, and his enemies must
have reckoned that he had confided in me. So I would be the next to go. It
might be that very night, or next day, or the day after, but my number was
up all right.
Then suddenly I thought of another probability. Supposing I went out
now and called in the police, or went to bed and let Paddock find the body
and call them in the morning. What kind of a story was I to tell about
Scudder? I had lied to Paddock about him, and the whole thing looked
desperately fishy. If I made a clean breast of it and told the police
everything he had told me, they would simply laugh at me. The odds were a
thousand to one that I would be charged with the murder, and the
circumstantial evidence was strong enough to hang me. Few people knew
me in England; I had no real pal who could come forward and swear to my
character. Perhaps that was what those secret enemies were playing for.
They were clever enough for anything, and an English prison was as good a
way of getting rid of me till after June 15th as a knife in my chest.
Besides, if I told the whole story, and by any miracle was believed, I
would be playing their game. Karolides would stay at home, which was
what they wanted. Somehow or other the sight of Scudder’s dead face had
made me a passionate believer in his scheme. He was gone, but he had
taken me into his confidence, and I was pretty well bound to carry on his
work.
You may think this ridiculous for a man in danger of his life, but that was
the way I looked at it. I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other
people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not
be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.
It took me an hour or two to think this out, and by that time I had come to
a decision. I must vanish somehow, and keep vanished till the end of the
second week in June. Then I must somehow find a way to get in touch with
the Government people and tell them what Scudder had told me. I wished to
Heaven he had told me more, and that I had listened more carefully to the
little he had told me. I knew nothing but the barest facts. There was a big
risk that, even if I weathered the other dangers, I would not be believed in
the end. I must take my chance of that, and hope that something might
happen which would confirm my tale in the eyes of the Government.
My first job was to keep going for the next three weeks. It was now the
24th day of May, and that meant twenty days of hiding before I could
venture to approach the powers that be. I reckoned that two sets of people
would be looking for me—Scudder’s enemies to put me out of existence,
and the police, who would want me for Scudder’s murder. It was going to
be a giddy hunt, and it was queer how the prospect comforted me. I had
been slack so long that almost any chance of activity was welcome. When I
had to sit alone with that corpse and wait on Fortune I was no better than a
crushed worm, but if my neck’s safety was to hang on my own wits I was
prepared to be cheerful about it.
 My next thought was whether Scudder had any papers about him to give
me a better clue to the business. I drew back the table-cloth and searched
his pockets, for I had no longer any shrinking from the body. The face was
wonderfully calm for a man who had been struck down in a moment. There
was nothing in the breast-pocket, and only a few loose coins and a cigar-
holder in the waistcoat. The trousers held a little penknife and some silver,
and the side pocket of his jacket contained an old crocodile-skin cigar-case.
There was no sign of the little black book in which I had seen him making
notes. That had no doubt been taken by his murderer.
But as I looked up from my task I saw that some drawers had been pulled
out in the writing-table. Scudder would never have left them in that state,
for he was the tidiest of mortals. Someone must have been searching for
something—perhaps for the pocket-book.
I went round the flat and found that everything had been ransacked—the
inside of books, drawers, cupboards, boxes, even the pockets of the clothes
in my wardrobe, and the sideboard in the dining-room. There was no trace
of the book. Most likely the enemy had found it, but they had not found it
on Scudder’s body.
Then I got out an atlas and looked at a big map of the British Isles. My
notion was to get off to some wild district, where my veldcraft would be of
some use to me, for I would be like a trapped rat in a city. I considered that
Scotland would be best, for my people were Scotch and I could pass
anywhere as an ordinary Scotsman. I had half an idea at first to be a
German tourist, for my father had had German partners, and I had been
brought up to speak the tongue pretty fluently, not to mention having put in
three years prospecting for copper in German Damaraland. But I calculated
that it would be less conspicuous to be a Scot, and less in a line with what
the police might know of my past. I fixed on Galloway as the best place to
go. It was the nearest wild part of Scotland, so far as I could figure it out,
and from the look of the map was not over thick with population.
A search in Bradshaw informed me that a train left St Pancras at 7.10,
which would land me at any Galloway station in the late afternoon. That
was well enough, but a more important matter was how I was to make my
way to St Pancras, for I was pretty certain that Scudder’s friends would be
watching outside. This puzzled me for a bit; then I had an inspiration, on
which I went to bed and slept for two troubled hours.
 I got up at four and opened my bedroom shutters. The faint light of a fine
summer morning was flooding the skies, and the sparrows had begun to
chatter. I had a great revulsion of feeling, and felt a God-forgotten fool. My
inclination was to let things slide, and trust to the British police taking a
reasonable view of my case. But as I reviewed the situation I could find no
arguments to bring against my decision of the previous night, so with a wry
mouth I resolved to go on with my plan. I was not feeling in any particular
funk; only disinclined to go looking for trouble, if you understand me.
I hunted out a well-used tweed suit, a pair of strong nailed boots, and a
flannel shirt with a collar. Into my pockets I stuffed a spare shirt, a cloth
cap, some handkerchiefs, and a tooth-brush. I had drawn a good sum in
gold from the bank two days before, in case Scudder should want money,
and I took fifty pounds of it in sovereigns in a belt which I had brought
back from Rhodesia. That was about all I wanted. Then I had a bath, and cut
my moustache, which was long and drooping, into a short stubbly fringe.
Now came the next step. Paddock used to arrive punctually at 7.30 and
let himself in with a latch-key. But about twenty minutes to seven, as I
knew from bitter experience, the milkman turned up with a great clatter of
cans, and deposited my share outside my door. I had seen that milkman
sometimes when I had gone out for an early ride. He was a young man
about my own height, with an ill-nourished moustache, and he wore a white
overall. On him I staked all my chances.
I went into the darkened smoking-room where the rays of morning light
were beginning to creep through the shutters. There I breakfasted off a
whisky-and-soda and some biscuits from the cupboard. By this time it was
getting on for six o’clock. I put a pipe in my pocket and filled my pouch
from the tobacco jar on the table by the fireplace.
As I poked into the tobacco my fingers touched something hard, and I
drew out Scudder’s little black pocket-book....
That seemed to me a good omen. I lifted the cloth from the body and was
amazed at the peace and dignity of the dead face. “Goodbye, old chap,” I
said; “I am going to do my best for you. Wish me well, wherever you are.”
Then I hung about in the hall waiting for the milkman. That was the
worst part of the business, for I was fairly choking to get out of doors. Six-
thirty passed, then six-forty, but still he did not come. The fool had chosen
this day of all days to be late.
 At one minute after the quarter to seven I heard the rattle of the cans
outside. I opened the front door, and there was my man, singling out my
cans from a bunch he carried and whistling through his teeth. He jumped a
bit at the sight of me.
“Come in here a moment,” I said. “I want a word with you.” And I led
him into the dining-room.
“I reckon you’re a bit of a sportsman,” I said, “and I want you to do me a
service. Lend me your cap and overall for ten minutes, and here’s a
sovereign for you.”
His eyes opened at the sight of the gold, and he grinned broadly. “Wot’s
the gyme?”he asked.
“A bet,” I said. “I haven’t time to explain, but to win it I’ve got to be a
milkman for the next ten minutes. All you’ve got to do is to stay here till I
come back. You’ll be a bit late, but nobody will complain, and you’ll have
that quid for yourself.”
“Right-o!” he said cheerily. “I ain’t the man to spoil a bit of sport. ’Ere’s
the rig, guv’nor.”
I stuck on his flat blue hat and his white overall, picked up the cans,
banged my door, and went whistling downstairs. The porter at the foot told
me to shut my jaw, which sounded as if my make-up was adequate.
At first I thought there was nobody in the street. Then I caught sight of a
policeman a hundred yards down, and a loafer shuffling past on the other
side. Some impulse made me raise my eyes to the house opposite, and there
at a first-floor window was a face. As the loafer passed he looked up, and I
fancied a signal was exchanged.
I crossed the street, whistling gaily and imitating the jaunty swing of the
milkman. Then I took the first side street, and went up a left-hand turning
which led past a bit of vacant ground. There was no one in the little street,
so I dropped the milk-cans inside the hoarding and sent the cap and overall
after them. I had only just put on my cloth cap when a postman came round
the corner. I gave him good morning and he answered me unsuspiciously.
At the moment the clock of a neighbouring church struck the hour of seven.
There was not a second to spare. As soon as I got to Euston Road I took
to my heels and ran. The clock at Euston Station showed five minutes past
the hour. At St Pancras I had no time to take a ticket, let alone that I had not
settled upon my destination. A porter told me the platform, and as I entered
it I saw the train already in motion. Two station officials blocked the way,
but I dodged them and clambered into the last carriage.
Three minutes later, as we were roaring through the northern tunnels, an
irate guard interviewed me. He wrote out for me a ticket to Newton-
Stewart, a name which had suddenly come back to my memory, and he
conducted me from the first-class compartment where I had ensconced
myself to a third-class smoker, occupied by a sailor and a stout woman with
a child. He went off grumbling, and as I mopped my brow I observed to my
companions in my broadest Scots that it was a sore job catching trains. I
had already entered upon my part.
“The impidence o’ that gyaird!” said the lady bitterly. “He needit a
Scotch tongue to pit him in his place. He was complainin’ o’ this wean no
haein’ a ticket and her no fower till August twalmonth, and he was objectin’
to this gentleman spittin’.”
The sailor morosely agreed, and I started my new life in an atmosphere
of protest against authority. I reminded myself that a week ago I had been
finding the world dull.
 Chapter III.
The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

I had a solemn time travelling north that day. It was fine May weather,
with the hawthorn flowering on every hedge, and I asked myself why, when
I was still a free man, I had stayed on in London and not got the good of
this heavenly country. I didn’t dare face the restaurant car, but I got a
luncheon-basket at Leeds and shared it with the fat woman. Also I got the
morning’s papers, with news about starters for the Derby and the beginning
of the cricket season, and some paragraphs about how Balkan affairs were
settling down and a British squadron was going to Kiel.
When I had done with them I got out Scudder’s little black pocket-book
and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings, chiefly figures, though
now and then a name was printed in. For example, I found the words
“Hofgaard”, “Luneville”, and “Avocado” pretty often, and especially the
word “Pavia”.
Now I was certain that Scudder never did anything without a reason, and
I was pretty sure that there was a cypher in all this. That is a subject which
has always interested me, and I did a bit at it myself once as intelligence
officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War. I have a head for things like
chess and puzzles, and I used to reckon myself pretty good at finding out
cyphers. This one looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures
correspond to the letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find
the clue to that sort after an hour or two’s work, and I didn’t think Scudder
would have been content with anything so easy. So I fastened on the printed
words, for you can make a pretty good numerical cypher if you have a key
word which gives you the sequence of the letters.
I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell asleep and
woke at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into the slow Galloway
train. There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn’t like, but he
never glanced at me, and when I caught sight of myself in the mirror of an
automatic machine I didn’t wonder. With my brown face, my old tweeds,
and my slouch, I was the very model of one of the hill farmers who were
crowding into the third-class carriages.
I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes.
They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of
prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and the
Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters. Above half the men had
lunched heavily and were highly flavoured with whisky, so they took no
notice of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then
to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills
showing northwards.
About five o’clock the carriage had emptied, and I was left alone as I had
hoped. I got out at the next station, a little place whose name I scarcely
noted, set right in the heart of a bog. It reminded me of one of those
forgotten little stations in the Karroo. An old station-master was digging in
his garden, and with his spade over his shoulder sauntered to the train, took
charge of a parcel, and went back to his potatoes. A child of ten received
my ticket, and I emerged on a white road that straggled over the brown
moor.
It was a gorgeous spring evening, with every hill showing as clear as a
cut amethyst. The air had the queer, rooty smell of bogs, but it was as fresh
as mid-ocean, and it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I actually felt
light-hearted. I might have been a boy out for a spring holiday tramp,
instead of a man of thirty-seven very much wanted by the police. I felt just
as I used to feel when I was starting for a big trek on a frosty morning on
the high veld. If you believe me, I swung along that road whistling. There
was no plan of campaign in my head, only just to go on and on in this
blessed, honest-smelling hill country, for every mile put me in better
humour with myself.
In a roadside planting I cut a walking-stick of hazel, and presently struck
off the highway up a by-path 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 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 wingèd 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 brings 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 U=XXI, and so on. “Czechenyi’ gave me the numerals for
the principal consonants. I scribbled that scheme on a bit of paper and sat
down to read Scudder’s pages.
 In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers that
drummed on the table.
I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming up the
glen towards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was the sound of
people alighting. There seemed to be two of them, men in aquascutums and
tweed caps.
Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes bright
with excitement.
“There’s two chaps below looking for you,” he whispered. “They’re in
the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked about you and said
they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they described you jolly well,
down to your boots and shirt. I told them you had been here last night and
had gone off on a motor bicycle this morning, and one of the chaps swore
like a navvy.”
I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed thin
fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and lisped in his
talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my young friend was
positive.
I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they were
part of a letter—

... “Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he could not
act for a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now,
especially as Karolides is uncertain about his plans. But if
Mr T. advises I will do the best I....”

I manufactured it rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page of a

private letter.
“Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask them to
return it to me if they overtake me.”
Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping from
behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was slim, the other
was sleek; that was the most I could make of my reconnaissance.
The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. “Your paper woke them up,”
he said gleefully. “The dark fellow went as white as death and cursed like
blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly. They paid for their drinks
with half-a-sovereign and wouldn’t wait for change.”
“Now I’ll tell you what I want you to do,” I said. “Get on your bicycle
and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe the two
men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do with the
London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back, never
fear. Not tonight, for they’ll follow me forty miles along the road, but first
thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here bright and early.”
He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder’s notes. When he
came back we dined together, and in common decency I had to let him
pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts and the Matabele War,
thinking all the while what tame businesses these were compared to this I
was now engaged in! When he went to bed I sat up and finished Scudder. I
smoked in a chair till daylight, for I could not sleep.
About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two constables and a
sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the innkeeper’s
instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes later I saw from my
window a second car come across the plateau from the opposite direction. It
did not come up to the inn, but stopped two hundred yards off in the shelter
of a patch of wood. I noticed that its occupants carefully reversed it before
leaving it. A minute or two later I heard their steps on the gravel outside the
window.
My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what happened. I
had a notion that, if I could bring the police and my other more dangerous
pursuers together, something might work out of it to my advantage. But
now I had a better idea. I scribbled a line of thanks to my host, opened the
window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed
the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad
on the far side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span
in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a long
journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur’s seat, and stole gently out
on to the plateau.
Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn, but the wind
seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.
 Chapter IV.
The Adventure of the Radical Candidate

You may picture me driving that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth over
the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing back at first
over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to the next turning; then driving
with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to keep on the highway. For I
was thinking desperately of what I had found in Scudder’s pocket-book.
The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans
and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash,
and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you shall hear. I had staked
everything on my belief in his story, and had been let down; here was his
book telling me a different tale, and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy,
I believed it absolutely.
Why, I don’t know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if you
understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The fifteenth day
of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger destiny than the killing of
a Dago. It was so big that I didn’t blame Scudder for keeping me out of the
game and wanting to play a lone hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his
intention. He had told me something which sounded big enough, but the
real thing was so immortally big that he, the man who had found it out,
wanted it all for himself. I didn’t blame him. It was risks after all that he
was chiefly greedy about.
The whole story was in the notes—with gaps, you understand, which he
would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down his authorities, too,
and had an odd trick of giving them all a numerical value and then striking
a balance, which stood for the reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four
names he had printed were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who
got five out of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got
three. The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book—these, and
one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside brackets.
(“Thirty-nine steps”) was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran—
(“Thirty-nine steps, I counted them—high tide 10.17 p.m.”). I could make
nothing of that.
The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing a war.
That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged, said Scudder,
ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be the occasion. He was
booked all right, and was to hand in his checks on June 14th, two weeks and
four days from that May morning. I gathered from Scudder’s notes that
nothing on earth could prevent that. His talk of Epirote guards that would
skin their own grandmothers was all billy-o.
The second thing was that this war was going to come as a mighty
surprise to Britain. Karolides’ death would set the Balkans by the ears, and
then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum. Russia wouldn’t like that,
and there would be high words. But Berlin would play the peacemaker, and
pour oil on the waters, till suddenly she would find a good cause for a
quarrel, pick it up, and in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a
pretty good one too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark.
While we were talking about the goodwill and good intentions of Germany
our coast would be silently ringed with mines, and submarines would be
waiting for every battleship.
But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to happen on
June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn’t once happened to
meet a French staff officer, coming back from West Africa, who had told
me a lot of things. One was that, in spite of all the nonsense talked in
Parliament, there was a real working alliance between France and Britain,
and that the two General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for
joint action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming over
from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a statement of the
disposition of the British Home Fleet on mobilization. At least I gathered it
was something like that; anyhow, it was something uncommonly important.
But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London—others, at
whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call them collectively the
“Black Stone”. They represented not our Allies, but our deadly foes; and
the information, destined for France, was to be diverted to their pockets.
And it was to be used, remember—used a week or two later, with great
guns and swift torpedoes, suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.
This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a country
inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my
brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.
My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister, but a
little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who would
believe my tale? I must show a sign, some token in proof, and Heaven knew
what that could be. Above all, I must keep going myself, ready to act when
things got riper, and that was going to be no light job with the police of the
British Isles in full cry after me and the watchers of the Black Stone
running silently and swiftly on my trail.
I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by the sun,
for I remembered from the map that if I went north I would come into a
region of coalpits and industrial towns. Presently I was down from the
moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of a river. For miles I ran
alongside a park wall, and in a break of the trees I saw a great castle. I
swung through little old thatched villages, and over peaceful lowland
streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The
land was so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere
behind me were those who sought my life; ay, and that in a month’s time,
unless I had the almightiest of luck, these round country faces would be
pinched and staring, and men would be lying dead in English fields.
About midday 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
hearthrug.
 “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
hearthrug.
“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 proofs. I may be an ass on the
platform, but I can size up a man. You’re no murderer and you’re no fool,
and I believe you are speaking the truth. I’m going to back you up. Now,
what can I do?”
“First, I want you to write a letter to your uncle. I’ve got to get in touch
with the Government people sometime before the 15th of June.”
He pulled his moustache. “That won’t help you. This is Foreign Office
business, and my uncle would have nothing to do with it. Besides, you’d
never convince him. No, I’ll go one better. I’ll write to the Permanent
Secretary at the Foreign Office. He’s my godfather, and one of the best
going. What do you want?”
He sat down at a table and wrote to my dictation. The gist of it was that if
a man called Twisdon (I thought I had better stick to that name) turned up
before June 15th he was to entreat him kindly. He said Twisdon would
prove his bona fides by passing the word “Black Stone” and whistling
“Annie Laurie”.
“Good,” said Sir Harry. “That’s the proper style. By the way, you’ll find
my godfather—his name’s Sir Walter Bullivant—down at his country
cottage for Whitsuntide. It’s close to Artinswell on the Kennet. That’s done.
Now, what’s the next thing?”
“You’re about my height. Lend me the oldest tweed suit you’ve got.
Anything will do, so long as the colour is the opposite of the clothes I
destroyed this afternoon. Then show me a map of the neighbourhood and
explain to me the lie of the land. Lastly, if the police come seeking me, just
show them the car in the glen. If the other lot turn up, tell them I caught the
south express after your meeting.”
He did, or promised to do, all these things. I shaved off the remnants of
my moustache, and got inside an ancient suit of what I believe is called
heather mixture. The map gave me some notion of my whereabouts, and
told me the two things I wanted to know—where the main railway to the
south could be joined, and what were the wildest districts near at hand.
At two o’clock he wakened me from my slumbers in the smoking-room
armchair, and led me blinking into the dark starry night. An old bicycle was
found in a tool-shed and handed over to me.
“First turn to the right up by the long fir-wood,” he enjoined. “By
daybreak you’ll be well into the hills. Then I should pitch the machine into
a bog and take to the moors on foot. You can put in a week among the
shepherds, and be as safe as if you were in New Guinea.”
I pedalled diligently up steep roads of hill gravel till the skies grew pale
with morning. As the mists cleared before the sun, I found myself in a wide
green world with glens falling on every side and a far-away blue horizon.
Here, at any rate, I could get early news of my enemies.
 Chapter V.
The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman

I sat down on the very crest of the pass and took stock of my position.
Behind me was the road climbing through a long cleft in the hills, which
was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was a flat space of maybe
a mile, all pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond
it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose blue dimness
melted into the distance. To left and right were round-shouldered green hills
as smooth as pancakes, but to the south—that is, the left hand—there was a
glimpse of high heathery mountains, which I remembered from the map as
the big knot of hill which I had chosen for my sanctuary. I was on the
central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything moving for
miles. In the meadows below the road half a mile back a cottage smoked,
but it was the only sign of human life. Otherwise there was only the calling
of plovers and the tinkling of little streams.
It was now about seven o’clock, and as I waited I heard once again that
ominous beat in the air. Then I realized that my vantage-ground might be in
reality a trap. There was no cover for a tomtit in those bald green places.
I sat quite still and hopeless while the beat grew louder. Then I saw an
aeroplane coming up from the east. It was flying high, but as I looked it
dropped several hundred feet and began to circle round the knot of hill in
narrowing circles, just as a hawk wheels before it pounces. Now it was
flying very low, and now the observer on board caught sight of me. I could
see one of the two occupants examining me through glasses.
Suddenly it began to rise in swift whorls, and the next I knew it was
speeding eastward again till it became a speck in the blue morning.
That made me do some savage thinking. My enemies had located me,
and the next thing would be a cordon round me. I didn’t know what force
they could command, but I was certain it would be sufficient. The aeroplane
had seen my bicycle, and would conclude that I would try to escape by the
road. In that case there might be a chance on the moors to the right or left. I
wheeled the machine a hundred yards from the highway, and plunged it into
a moss-hole, where it sank among pond-weed and water-buttercups. Then I
climbed to a knoll which gave me a view of the two valleys. Nothing was
stirring on the long white ribbon that threaded them.
I have said there was not cover in the whole place to hide a rat. As the
day advanced it was flooded with soft fresh light till it had the fragrant
sunniness of the South African veld. At other times I would have liked the
place, but now it seemed to suffocate me. The free moorlands were prison
walls, and the keen hill air was the breath of a dungeon.
I tossed a coin—heads right, tails left—and it fell heads, so I turned to
the north. In a little I came to the brow of the ridge which was the
containing wall of the pass. I saw the highroad for maybe ten miles, and far
down it something that was moving, and that I took to be a motor-car.
Beyond the ridge I looked on a rolling green moor, which fell away into
wooded glens.
Now my life on the veld has given me the eyes of a kite, and I can see
things for which most men need a telescope.... Away down the slope, a
couple of miles away, several men were advancing, like a row of beaters at
a shoot.
I dropped out of sight behind the sky-line. That way was shut to me, and
I must try the bigger hills to the south beyond the highway. The car I had
noticed was getting nearer, but it was still a long way off with some very
steep gradients before it. I ran hard, crouching low except in the hollows,
and as I ran I kept scanning the brow of the hill before me. Was it
imagination, or did I see figures—one, two, perhaps more—moving in a
glen beyond the stream?
If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land there is only one
chance of escape. You must stay in the patch, and let your enemies search it
and not find you. That was good sense, but how on earth was I to escape
notice in that table-cloth of a place? I would have buried myself to the neck
in mud or lain below water or climbed the tallest tree. But there was not a
stick of wood, the bog-holes were little puddles, the stream was a slender
trickle. There was nothing but short heather, and bare hill bent, and the
white highway.

Then in a tiny bight of road, beside a heap of stones, I found the

roadman.
He had just arrived, and was wearily flinging down his hammer. He
looked at me with a fishy eye and yawned.
“Confoond the day I ever left the herdin’!” he said, as if to the world at
large. “There I was my ain maister. Now I’m a slave to the Goavernment,
tethered to the roadside, wi’ sair een, and a back like a suckle.”
He took up the hammer, struck a stone, dropped the implement with an
oath, and put both hands to his ears. “Mercy on me! My heid’s burstin’!” he
cried.
He was a wild figure, about my own size but much bent, with a week’s
beard on his chin, and a pair of big horn spectacles.
“I canna dae’t,” he cried again. “The Surveyor maun just report me. I’m
for my bed.”
I asked him what was the trouble, though indeed that was clear enough.
“The trouble is that I’m no sober. Last nicht my dochter Merran was
waddit, and they danced till fower in the byre. Me and some ither chiels sat
down to the drinkin’, and here I am. Peety that I ever lookit on the wine
when it was red!”
I agreed with him about bed.
“It’s easy speakin’,” he moaned. “But I got a postcard yestreen sayin’
that the new Road Surveyor would be round the day. He’ll come and he’ll
no find me, or else he’ll find me fou, and either way I’m a done man. I’ll
awa’ back to my bed and say I’m no weel, but I doot that’ll no help me, for
they ken my kind o’ no-weel-ness.”
Then I had an inspiration. “Does the new Surveyor know you?” I asked.
“No him. He’s just been a week at the job. He rins about in a wee motor-
cawr, and wad speir the inside oot o’ a whelk.”
“Where’s your house?” I asked, and was directed by a wavering finger to
the cottage by the stream.
“Well, back to your bed,” I said, “and sleep in peace. I’ll take on your job
for a bit and see the Surveyor.”
 He stared at me blankly; then, as the notion dawned on his fuddled brain,
his face broke into the vacant drunkard’s smile.
“You’re the billy,” he cried. “It’ll be easy eneuch managed. I’ve finished
that bing o’ stanes, so you needna chap ony mair this forenoon. Just take the
barry, and wheel eneuch metal frae yon quarry doon the road to mak anither
bing the morn. My name’s Alexander Trummle, 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 midday.”
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 midday
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 footgear.
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 midday a big car stole down the hill, glided past and drew up a
hundred yards beyond. Its three occupants descended as if to stretch their
legs, and sauntered towards me.
Two of the men I had seen before from the window of the Galloway inn
—one lean, sharp, and dark, the other comfortable and smiling. The third
had the look of a countryman—a vet, perhaps, or a small farmer. He was
dressed in ill-cut knickerbockers, and the eye in his head was as bright and
wary as a hen’s.
“Morning,” said the last. “That’s a fine easy job o’ yours.”
I had not looked up on their approach, and now, when accosted, I slowly
and painfully straightened my back, after the manner of roadmen; spat
vigorously, after the manner of the low Scot; and regarded them steadily
before replying. I confronted three pairs of eyes that missed nothing.
“There’s waur jobs and there’s better,” I said sententiously. “I wad rather
hae yours, sittin’ a’ day on your hinderlands on thae cushions. It’s you and
your muckle cawrs that wreck my roads! If we a’ had oor richts, ye sud be
made to mend what ye break.”
The bright-eyed man was looking at the newspaper lying beside
Turnbull’s bundle.
“I see you get your papers in good time,” he said.
I glanced at it casually. “Aye, in gude time. Seein’ that that paper cam’
out last Setterday I’m just sax days late.”
He picked it up, glanced at the superscription, and laid it down again.
One of the others had been looking at my boots, and a word in German
called the speaker’s attention to them.
“You’ve a fine taste in boots,” he said. “These were never made by a
country shoemaker.”
“They were not,” I said readily. “They were made in London. I got them
frae the gentleman that was here last year for the shootin’. What was his
name now?” And I scratched a forgetful head. Again the sleek one spoke in
German. “Let us get on,” he said. “This fellow is all right.”
 They asked one last question.
“Did you see anyone pass early this morning? He might be on a bicycle
or he might be on foot.”
I very nearly fell into the trap and told a story of a bicyclist hurrying past
in the grey dawn. But I had the sense to see my danger. I pretended to
consider very deeply.
“I wasna up very early,” I said. “Ye see, my dochter was merrit last nicht,
and we keepit it up late. I opened the house door about seeven and there
was naebody on the road then. Since I cam up here there has just been the
baker and the Ruchill herd, besides you gentlemen.”
One of them gave me a cigar, which I smelt gingerly and stuck in
Turnbull’s bundle. They got into their car and were out of sight in three
minutes.
My heart leaped with an enormous relief, but I went on wheeling my
stones. It was as well, for ten minutes later the car returned, one of the
occupants waving a hand to me. Those gentry left nothing to chance.
I finished Turnbull’s bread and cheese, and pretty soon I had finished the
stones. The next step was what puzzled me. I could not keep up this
roadmaking business for long. A merciful Providence had kept Mr Turnbull
indoors, but if he appeared on the scene there would be trouble. I had a
notion that the cordon was still tight round the glen, and that if I walked in
any direction I should meet with questioners. But get out I must. No man’s
nerve could stand more than a day of being spied on.
I stayed at my post till five o’clock. By that time I had resolved to go
down to Turnbull’s cottage at nightfall and take my chance of getting over
the hills in the darkness. But suddenly a new car came up the road, and
slowed down a yard or two from me. A fresh wind had risen, and the
occupant wanted to light a cigarette.
It was a touring car, with the tonneau full of an assortment of baggage.
One man sat in it, and by an amazing chance I knew him. His name was
Marmaduke Jopley, and he was an offence to creation. He was a sort of
blood stockbroker, who did his business by toadying eldest sons and rich
young peers and foolish old ladies. “Marmie’ was a familiar figure, I
understood, at balls and polo-weeks and country houses. He was an adroit
scandal-monger, and would crawl a mile on his belly to anything that had a
title or a million. I had a business introduction to his firm when I came to
London, and he was good enough to ask me to dinner at his club. There he
showed off at a great rate, and pattered about his duchesses till the snobbery
of the creature turned me sick. I asked a man afterwards why nobody
kicked him, and was told that Englishmen reverenced the weaker sex.
Anyhow there he was now, nattily dressed, in a fine new car, obviously
on his way to visit some of his smart friends. A sudden daftness took me,
and in a second I had jumped into the tonneau and had him by the shoulder.
“Hullo, Jopley,” I sang out. “Well met, my lad!” He got a horrid fright.
His chin dropped as he stared at me. “Who the devil are you?” he gasped.
“My name’s Hannay,” I said. “From Rhodesia, you remember.”
“Good God, the murderer!” he choked.
“Just so. And there’ll be a second murder, my dear, if you don’t do as I
tell you. Give me that coat of yours. That cap, too.”
He did as he was bid, for he was blind with terror. Over my dirty trousers
and vulgar shirt I put on his smart driving-coat, which buttoned high at the
top and thereby hid the deficiencies of my collar. I stuck the cap on my
head, and added his gloves to my get-up. The dusty roadman in a minute
was transformed into one of the neatest motorists in Scotland. On Mr
Jopley’s head I clapped Turnbull’s unspeakable hat, and told him to keep it
there.
Then with some difficulty I turned the car. My plan was to go back the
road he had come, for the watchers, having seen it before, would probably
let it pass unremarked, and Marmie’s figure was in no way like mine.
“Now, my child,” I said, “sit quite still and be a good boy. I mean you no
harm. I’m only borrowing your car for an hour or two. But if you play me
any tricks, and above all if you open your mouth, as sure as there’s a God
above me I’ll wring your neck. Savez?”
I enjoyed that evening’s ride. We ran eight miles down the valley,
through a village or two, and I could not help noticing several strange-
looking folk lounging by the roadside. These were the watchers who would
have had much to say to me if I had come in other garb or company. As it
was, they looked incuriously on. One touched his cap in salute, and I
responded graciously.
 As the dark fell I turned up a side glen which, as I remember from the
map, led into an unfrequented corner of the hills. Soon the villages were left
behind, then the farms, and then even the wayside cottage. Presently we
came to a lonely moor where the night was blackening the sunset gleam in
the bog pools. Here we stopped, and I obligingly reversed the car and
restored to Mr Jopley his belongings.
“A thousand thanks,” I said. “There’s more use in you than I thought.
Now be off and find the police.”
As I sat on the hillside, watching the tail-light dwindle, I reflected on the
various kinds of crime I had now sampled. Contrary to general belief, I was
not a murderer, but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless impostor, and
a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motor-cars.
 Chapter VI.
The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist

I spent the night on a shelf of the hillside, in the lee of a boulder where
the heather grew long and soft. It was a cold business, for I had neither coat
nor waistcoat. These were in Mr Turnbull’s keeping, as was Scudder’s little
book, my watch and—worst of all—my pipe and tobacco pouch. Only my
money accompanied me in my belt, and about half a pound of ginger
biscuits in my trousers pocket.
I supped off half those biscuits, and by worming myself deep into the
heather got some kind of warmth. My spirits had risen, and I was beginning
to enjoy this crazy game of hide-and-seek. So far I had been miraculously
lucky. The milkman, the literary innkeeper, Sir Harry, the roadman, and the
idiotic Marmie, were all pieces of undeserved good fortune. Somehow the
first success gave me a feeling that I was going to pull the thing through.
My chief trouble was that I was desperately hungry. When a Jew shoots
himself in the City and there is an inquest, the newspapers usually report
that the deceased was “well-nourished”. I remember thinking that they
would not call me well-nourished if I broke my neck in a bog-hole. I lay
and tortured myself—for the ginger biscuits merely emphasized the aching
void—with the memory of all the good food I had thought so little of in
London. There were Paddock’s crisp sausages and fragrant shavings of
bacon, and shapely poached eggs—how often I had turned up my nose at
them! There were the cutlets they did at the club, and a particular ham that
stood on the cold table, for which my soul lusted. My thoughts hovered
over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak
and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for
these dainties I fell asleep.
I woke very cold and stiff about an hour after dawn. It took me a little
while to remember where I was, for I had been very weary and had slept
heavily. I saw first the pale blue sky through a net of heather, then a big
shoulder of hill, and then my own boots placed neatly in a blaeberry bush. I
raised myself on my arms and looked down into the valley, and that one
look set me lacing up my boots in mad haste.
For there were men below, not more than a quarter of a mile off, spaced
out on the hillside like a fan, and beating the heather. Marmie had not been
slow in looking for his revenge.
I crawled out of my shelf into the cover of a boulder, and from it gained a
shallow trench which slanted up the mountain face. This led me presently
into the narrow gully of a burn, by way of which I scrambled to the top of
the ridge. From there I looked back, and saw that I was still undiscovered.
My pursuers were patiently quartering the hillside and moving upwards.
Keeping behind the skyline I ran for maybe half a mile, till I judged I was
above the uppermost end of the glen. Then I showed myself, and was
instantly noted by one of the flankers, who passed the word to the others. I
heard cries coming up from below, and saw that the line of search had
changed its direction. I pretended to retreat over the skyline, but instead
went back the way I had come, and in twenty minutes was behind the ridge
overlooking my sleeping place. From that viewpoint I had the satisfaction
of seeing the pursuit streaming up the hill at the top of the glen on a
hopelessly false scent.
I had before me a choice of routes, and I chose a ridge which made an
angle with the one I was on, and so would soon put a deep glen between me
and my enemies. The exercise had warmed my blood, and I was beginning
to enjoy myself amazingly. As I went I breakfasted on the dusty remnants
of the ginger biscuits.
I knew very little about the country, and I hadn’t a notion what I was
going to do. I trusted to the strength of my legs, but I was well aware that
those behind me would be familiar with the lie of the land, and that my
ignorance would be a heavy handicap. I saw in front of me a sea of hills,
rising very high towards the south, but northwards breaking down into
broad ridges which separated wide and shallow dales. The ridge I had
chosen seemed to sink after a mile or two to a moor which lay like a pocket
in the uplands. That seemed as good a direction to take as any other.
My stratagem had given me a fair start—call it twenty minutes—and I
had the width of a glen behind me before I saw the first heads of the
pursuers. The police had evidently called in local talent to their aid, and the
men I could see had the appearance of herds or gamekeepers. They hallooed
at the sight of me, and I waved my hand. Two dived into the glen and began
to climb my ridge, while the others kept their own side of the hill. I felt as if
I were taking part in a schoolboy game of hare and hounds.
But very soon it began to seem less of a game. Those fellows behind
were hefty men on their native heath. Looking back I saw that only three
were following direct, and I guessed that the others had fetched a circuit to
cut me off. My lack of local knowledge might very well be my undoing,
and I resolved to get out of this tangle of glens to the pocket of moor I had
seen from the tops. I must so increase my distance as to get clear away from
them, and I believed I could do this if I could find the right ground for it. If
there had been cover I would have tried a bit of stalking, but on these bare
slopes you could see a fly a mile off. My hope must be in the length of my
legs and the soundness of my wind, but I needed easier ground for that, for I
was not bred a mountaineer. How I longed for a good Afrikander pony!
I put on a great spurt and got off my ridge and down into the moor before
any figures appeared on the skyline behind me. I crossed a burn, and came
out on a highroad which made a pass between two glens. All in front of me
was a big field of heather sloping up to a crest which was crowned with an
odd feather of trees. In the dyke by the roadside was a gate, from which a
grass-grown track led over the first wave of the moor.
I jumped the dyke and followed it, and after a few hundred yards—as
soon as it was out of sight of the highway—the grass stopped and it became
a very respectable road, which was evidently kept with some care. Clearly it
ran to a house, and I began to think of doing the same. Hitherto my luck had
held, and it might be that my best chance would be found in this remote
dwelling. Anyhow there were trees there, and that meant cover.
I did not follow the road, but the burnside which flanked it on the right,
where the bracken grew deep and the high banks made a tolerable screen. It
was well I did so, for no sooner had I gained the hollow than, looking back,
I saw the pursuit topping the ridge from which I had descended.
After that I did not look back; I had no time. I ran up the burnside,
crawling over the open places, and for a large part wading in the shallow
stream. I found a deserted cottage with a row of phantom peat-stacks and an
overgrown garden. Then I was among young hay, and very soon had come
to the edge of a plantation of wind-blown firs. From there I saw the
chimneys of the house smoking a few hundred yards to my left. I forsook
the burnside, crossed another dyke, and almost before I knew was on a
rough lawn. A glance back told me that I was well out of sight of the
pursuit, which had not yet passed the first lift of the moor.
The lawn was a very rough place, cut with a scythe instead of a mower,
and planted with beds of scrubby rhododendrons. A brace of black-game,
which are not usually garden birds, rose at my approach. The house before
me was the ordinary moorland farm, with a more pretentious whitewashed
wing added. Attached to this wing was a glass veranda, and through the
glass I saw the face of an elderly gentleman meekly watching me.
I stalked over the border of coarse hill gravel and entered the open
veranda door. Within was a pleasant room, glass on one side, and on the
other a mass of books. More books showed in an inner room. On the floor,
instead of tables, stood cases such as you see in a museum, filled with coins
and queer stone implements.
There was a knee-hole desk in the middle, and seated at it, with some
papers and open volumes before him, was the benevolent old gentleman.
His face was round and shiny, like Mr Pickwick’s, big glasses were stuck on
the end of his nose, and the top of his head was as bright and bare as a glass
bottle. He never moved when I entered, but raised his placid eyebrows and
waited on me to speak.
It was not an easy job, with about five minutes to spare, to tell a stranger
who I was and what I wanted, and to win his aid. I did not attempt it. There
was something about the eye of the man before me, something so keen and
knowledgeable, that I could not find a word. I simply stared at him and
stuttered.
“You seem in a hurry, my friend,” he said slowly.
I nodded towards the window. It gave a prospect across the moor through
a gap in the plantation, and revealed certain figures half a mile off
straggling through the heather.
“Ah, I see,” he said, and took up a pair of field-glasses through which he
patiently scrutinized the figures.
“A fugitive from justice, eh? Well, we’ll go into the matter at our leisure.
Meantime I object to my privacy being broken in upon by the clumsy rural
policeman. Go into my study, and you will see two doors facing you. Take
the one on the left and close it behind you. You will be perfectly safe.”
And this extraordinary man took up his pen again.
I did as I was bid, and found myself in a little dark chamber which smelt
of chemicals, and was lit only by a tiny window high up in the wall. The
door had swung behind me with a click like the door of a safe. Once again I
had found an unexpected sanctuary.
All the same I was not comfortable. There was something about the old
gentleman which puzzled and rather terrified me. He had been too easy and
ready, almost as if he had expected me. And his eyes had been horribly
intelligent.
No sound came to me in that dark place. For all I knew the police might
be searching the house, and if they did they would want to know what was
behind this door. I tried to possess my soul in patience, and to forget how
hungry I was.
Then I took a more cheerful view. The old gentleman could scarcely
refuse me a meal, and I fell to reconstructing my breakfast. Bacon and eggs
would content me, but I wanted the better part of a flitch of bacon and half a
hundred eggs. And then, while my mouth was watering in anticipation,
there was a click and the door stood open.
I emerged into the sunlight to find the master of the house sitting in a
deep armchair in the room he called his study, and regarding me with
curious eyes.
“Have they gone?” I asked.
“They have gone. I convinced them that you had crossed the hill. I do not
choose that the police should come between me and one whom I am
delighted to honour. This is a lucky morning for you, Mr Richard Hannay.”
As he spoke his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall a little over his
keen grey eyes. In a flash the phrase of Scudder’s came back to me, when
he had described the man he most dreaded in the world. He had said that he
“could hood his eyes like a hawk”. Then I saw that I had walked straight
into the enemy’s headquarters.
My first impulse was to throttle the old ruffian and make for the open air.
He seemed to anticipate my intention, for he smiled gently, and nodded to
the door behind me. I turned, and saw two men-servants who had me
covered with pistols.
He knew my name, but he had never seen me before. And as the
reflection darted across my mind I saw a slender chance.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said roughly. “And who are you calling
Richard Hannay? My name’s Ainslie.”
“So?” he said, still smiling. “But of course you have others. We won’t
quarrel about a name.”
I was pulling myself together now, and I reflected that my garb, lacking
coat and waistcoat and collar, would at any rate not betray me. I put on my
surliest face and shrugged my shoulders.
“I suppose you’re going to give me up after all, and I call it a damned
dirty trick. My God, I wish I had never seen that cursed motor-car! Here’s
the money and be damned to you,” and I flung four sovereigns on the table.
He opened his eyes a little. “Oh no, I shall not give you up. My friends
and I will have a little private settlement with you, that is all. You know a
little too much, Mr Hannay. You are a clever actor, but not quite clever
enough.”
He spoke with assurance, but I could see the dawning of a doubt in his
mind.
“Oh, for God’s sake stop jawing,” I cried. “Everything’s against me. I
haven’t had a bit of luck since I came on shore at Leith. What’s the harm in
a poor devil with an empty stomach picking up some money he finds in a
bust-up motor-car? That’s all I done, and for that I’ve been chivvied for two
days by those blasted bobbies over those blasted hills. I tell you I’m fair
sick of it. You can do what you like, old boy! Ned Ainslie’s got no fight left
in him.”
I could see that the doubt was gaining.
“Will you oblige me with the story of your recent doings?” he asked.
“I can’t, guv’nor,” I said in a real beggar’s whine. “I’ve not had a bite to
eat for two days. Give me a mouthful of food, and then you’ll hear God’s
truth.”
I must have showed my hunger in my face, for he signalled to one of the
men in the doorway. A bit of cold pie was brought and a glass of beer, and I
wolfed them down like a pig—or rather, like Ned Ainslie, for I was keeping
up my character. In the middle of my meal he spoke suddenly to me in
German, but I turned on him a face as blank as a stone wall.
Then I told him my story—how I had come off an Archangel ship at
Leith a week ago, and was making my way overland to my brother at
Wigtown. I had run short of cash—I hinted vaguely at a spree—and I was
pretty well on my uppers when I had come on a hole in a hedge, and,
looking through, had seen a big motor-car lying in the burn. I had poked
about to see what had happened, and had found three sovereigns lying on
the seat and one on the floor. There was nobody there or any sign of an
owner, so I had pocketed the cash. But somehow the law had got after me.
When I had tried to change a sovereign in a baker’s shop, the woman had
cried on the police, and a little later, when I was washing my face in a burn,
I had been nearly gripped, and had only got away by leaving my coat and
waistcoat behind me.
“They can have the money back,” I cried, “for a fat lot of good it’s done
me. Those perishers are all down on a poor man. Now, if it had been you,
guv’nor, that had found the quids, nobody would have troubled you.”
“You’re a good liar, Hannay,” he said.
I flew into a rage. “Stop fooling, damn you! I tell you my name’s Ainslie,
and I never heard of anyone called Hannay in my born days. I’d sooner
have the police than you with your Hannays and your monkey-faced pistol
tricks.... No, guv’nor, I beg pardon, I don’t mean that. I’m much obliged to
you for the grub, and I’ll thank you to let me go now the coast’s clear.”
It was obvious that he was badly puzzled. You see he had never seen me,
and my appearance must have altered considerably from my photographs, if
he had got one of them. I was pretty smart and well dressed in London, and
now I was a regular tramp.
“I do not propose to let you go. If you are what you say you are, you will
soon have a chance of clearing yourself. If you are what I believe you are, I
do not think you will see the light much longer.”
He rang a bell, and a third servant appeared from the veranda.
“I want the Lanchester in five minutes,” he said. “There will be three to
luncheon.”
Then he looked steadily at me, and that was the hardest ordeal of all.
 There was something weird and devilish in those eyes, cold, malignant,
unearthly, and most hellishly clever. They fascinated me like the bright eyes
of a snake. I had a strong impulse to throw myself on his mercy and offer to
join his side, and if you consider the way I felt about the whole thing you
will see that that impulse must have been purely physical, the weakness of a
brain mesmerized and mastered by a stronger spirit. But I managed to stick
it out and even to grin.
“You’ll know me next time, guv’nor,” I said.
“Karl,” he spoke in German to one of the men in the doorway, “you will
put this fellow in the storeroom till I return, and you will be answerable to
me for his keeping.”
I was marched out of the room with a pistol at each ear.

The storeroom was a damp chamber in what had been the old farmhouse.
There was no carpet on the uneven floor, and nothing to sit down on but a
school form. It was black as pitch, for the windows were heavily shuttered.
I made out by groping that the walls were lined with boxes and barrels and
sacks of some heavy stuff. The whole place smelt of mould and disuse. My
gaolers turned the key in the door, and I could hear them shifting their feet
as they stood on guard outside.
I sat down in that chilly darkness in a very miserable frame of mind. The
old boy had gone off in a motor to collect the two ruffians who had
interviewed me yesterday. Now, they had seen me as the roadman, and they
would remember me, for I was in the same rig. What was a roadman doing
twenty miles from his beat, pursued by the police? A question or two would
put them on the track. Probably they had seen Mr Turnbull, probably
Marmie too; most likely they could link me up with Sir Harry, and then the
whole thing would be crystal clear. What chance had I in this moorland
house with three desperadoes and their armed servants?
I began to think wistfully of the police, now plodding over the hills after
my wraith. They at any rate were fellow-countrymen and honest men, and
their tender mercies would be kinder than these ghoulish aliens. But they
wouldn’t have listened to me. That old devil with the eyelids had not taken
long to get rid of them. I thought he probably had some kind of graft with
the constabulary. Most likely he had letters from Cabinet Ministers saying
he was to be given every facility for plotting against Britain. That’s the sort
of owlish way we run our politics in this jolly old country.
The three would be back for lunch, so I hadn’t more than a couple of
hours to wait. It was simply waiting on destruction, for I could see no way
out of this mess. I wished that I had Scudder’s courage, for I am free to
confess I didn’t feel any great fortitude. The only thing that kept me going
was that I was pretty furious. It made me boil with rage to think of those
three spies getting the pull on me like this. I hoped that at any rate I might
be able to twist one of their necks before they downed me.
The more I thought of it the angrier I grew, and I had to get up and move
about the room. I tried the shutters, but they were the kind that lock with a
key, and I couldn’t move them. From the outside came the faint clucking of
hens in the warm sun. Then I groped among the sacks and boxes. I couldn’t
open the latter, and the sacks seemed to be full of things like dog-biscuits
that smelt of cinnamon. But, as I circumnavigated the room, I found a
handle in the wall which seemed worth investigating.
It was the door of a wall cupboard—what they call a “press” in Scotland
—and it was locked. I shook it, and it seemed rather flimsy. For want of
something better to do I put out my strength on that door, getting some
purchase on the handle by looping my braces round it. Presently the thing
gave with a crash which I thought would bring in my warders to inquire. I
waited for a bit, and then started to explore the cupboard shelves.
There was a multitude of queer things there. I found an odd vesta or two
in my trouser pockets and struck a light. It was out in a second, but it
showed me one thing. There was a little stock of electric torches on one
shelf. I picked up one, and found it was in working order.
With the torch to help me I investigated further. There were bottles and
cases of queer-smelling stuffs, chemicals no doubt for experiments, and
there were coils of fine copper wire and yanks and yanks of thin oiled silk.
There was a box of detonators, and a lot of cord for fuses. Then away at the
back of the shelf I found a stout brown cardboard box, and inside it a
wooden case. I managed to wrench it open, and within lay half a dozen little
grey bricks, each a couple of inches square.
I took up one, and found that it crumbled easily in my hand. Then I smelt
it and put my tongue to it. After that I sat down to think. I hadn’t been a
mining engineer for nothing, and I knew lentonite when I saw it.
 With one of these bricks I could blow the house to smithereens. I had
used the stuff in Rhodesia and knew its power. But the trouble was that my
knowledge wasn’t exact. I had forgotten the proper charge and the right way
of preparing it, and I wasn’t sure about the timing. I had only a vague
notion, too, as to its power, for though I had used it I had not handled it with
my own fingers.
But it was a chance, the only possible chance. It was a mighty risk, but
against it was an absolute black certainty. If I used it the odds were, as I
reckoned, about five to one in favour of my blowing myself into the tree-
tops; but if I didn’t I should very likely be occupying a six-foot hole in the
garden by the evening. That was the way I had to look at it. The prospect
was pretty dark either way, but anyhow there was a chance, both for myself
and for my country.
The remembrance of little Scudder decided me. It was about the
beastliest moment of my life, for I’m no good at these cold-blooded
resolutions. Still I managed to rake up the pluck to set my teeth and choke
back the horrid doubts that flooded in on me. I simply shut off my mind and
pretended I was doing an experiment as simple as Guy Fawkes fireworks.
I got a detonator, and fixed it to a couple of feet of fuse. Then I took a
quarter of a lentonite brick, and buried it near the door below one of the
sacks in a crack of the floor, fixing the detonator in it. For all I knew half
those boxes might be dynamite. If the cupboard held such deadly
explosives, why not the boxes? In that case there would be a glorious
skyward journey for me and the German servants and about an acre of
surrounding country. There was also the risk that the detonation might set
off the other bricks in the cupboard, for I had forgotten most that I knew
about lentonite. But it didn’t do to begin thinking about the possibilities.
The odds were horrible, but I had to take them.
I ensconced myself just below the sill of the window, and lit the fuse.
Then I waited for a moment or two. There was dead silence—only a shuffle
of heavy boots in the passage, and the peaceful cluck of hens from the
warm out-of-doors. I commended my soul to my Maker, and wondered
where I would be in five seconds....
A great wave of heat seemed to surge upwards from the floor, and hang
for a blistering instant in the air. Then the wall opposite me flashed into a
golden yellow and dissolved with a rending thunder that hammered my
brain into a pulp. Something dropped on me, catching the point of my left
shoulder.
And then I think I became unconscious.
My stupor can scarcely have lasted beyond a few seconds. I felt myself
being choked by thick yellow fumes, and struggled out of the debris to my
feet. Somewhere behind me I felt fresh air. The jambs of the window had
fallen, and through the ragged rent the smoke was pouring out to the
summer noon. I stepped over the broken lintel, and found myself standing
in a yard in a dense and acrid fog. I felt very sick and ill, but I could move
my limbs, and I staggered blindly forward away from the house.
A small mill-lade ran in a wooden aqueduct at the other side of the yard,
and into this I fell. The cool water revived me, and I had just enough wits
left to think of escape. I squirmed up the lade among the slippery green
slime till I reached the mill-wheel. Then I wriggled through the axle hole
into the old mill and tumbled on to a bed of chaff. A nail caught the seat of
my trousers, and I left a wisp of heather-mixture behind me.
The mill had been long out of use. The ladders were rotten with age, and
in the loft the rats had gnawed great holes in the floor. Nausea shook me,
and a wheel in my head kept turning, while my left shoulder and arm
seemed to be stricken with the palsy. I looked out of the window and saw a
fog still hanging over the house and smoke escaping from an upper window.
Please God I had set the place on fire, for I could hear confused cries
coming from the other side.
But I had no time to linger, since this mill was obviously a bad hiding-
place. Anyone looking for me would naturally follow the lade, and I made
certain the search would begin as soon as they found that my body was not
in the storeroom. From another window I saw that on the far side of the mill
stood an old stone dovecot. If I could get there without leaving tracks I
might find a hiding-place, for I argued that my enemies, if they thought I
could move, would conclude I had made for open country, and would go
seeking me on the moor.
I crawled down the broken ladder, scattering chaff behind me to cover
my footsteps. I did the same on the mill floor, and on the threshold where
the door hung on broken hinges. Peeping out, I saw that between me and
the dovecot was a piece of bare cobbled ground, where no footmarks would
show. Also it was mercifully hid by the mill buildings from any view from
the house. I slipped across the space, got to the back of the dovecot and
prospected a way of ascent.
That was one of the hardest jobs I ever took on. My shoulder and arm
ached like hell, and I was so sick and giddy that I was always on the verge
of falling. But I managed it somehow. By the use of out-jutting stones and
gaps in the masonry and a tough ivy root I got to the top in the end. There
was a little parapet behind which I found space to lie down. Then I
proceeded to go off into an old-fashioned swoon.
I woke with a burning head and the sun glaring in my face. For a long
time I lay motionless, for those horrible fumes seemed to have loosened my
joints and dulled my brain. Sounds came to me from the house—men
speaking throatily and the throbbing of a stationary car. There was a little
gap in the parapet to which I wriggled, and from which I had some sort of
prospect of the yard. I saw figures come out—a servant with his head bound
up, and then a younger man in knickerbockers. They were looking for
something, and moved towards the mill. Then one of them caught sight of
the wisp of cloth on the nail, and cried out to the other. They both went
back to the house, and brought two more to look at it. I saw the rotund
figure of my late captor, and I thought I made out the man with the lisp. I
noticed that all had pistols.
For half an hour they ransacked the mill. I could hear them kicking over
the barrels and pulling up the rotten planking. Then they came outside, and
stood just below the dovecot arguing fiercely. The servant with the bandage
was being soundly rated. I heard them fiddling with the door of the
dovecote and for one horrid moment I fancied they were coming up. Then
they thought better of it, and went back to the house.
All that long blistering afternoon I lay baking on the rooftop. Thirst was
my chief torment. My tongue was like a stick, and to make it worse I could
hear the cool drip of water from the mill-lade. I watched the course of the
little stream as it came in from the moor, and my fancy followed it to the
top of the glen, where it must issue from an icy fountain fringed with cool
ferns and mosses. I would have given a thousand pounds to plunge my face
into that.
I had a fine prospect of the whole ring of moorland. I saw the car speed
away with two occupants, and a man on a hill pony riding east. I judged
they were looking for me, and I wished them joy of their quest.
 But I saw something else more interesting. The house stood almost on the
summit of a swell of moorland which crowned a sort of plateau, and there
was no higher point nearer than the big hills six miles off. The actual
summit, as I have mentioned, was a biggish clump of trees—firs mostly,
with a few ashes and beeches. On the dovecot I was almost on a level with
the tree-tops, and could see what lay beyond. The wood was not solid, but
only a ring, and inside was an oval of green turf, for all the world like a big
cricket-field.
I didn’t take long to guess what it was. It was an aerodrome, and a secret
one. The place had been most cunningly chosen. For suppose anyone were
watching an aeroplane descending here, he would think it had gone over the
hill beyond the trees. As the place was on the top of a rise in the midst of a
big amphitheatre, any observer from any direction would conclude it had
passed out of view behind the hill. Only a man very close at hand would
realize that the aeroplane had not gone over but had descended in the midst
of the wood. An observer with a telescope on one of the higher hills might
have discovered the truth, but only herds went there, and herds do not carry
spy-glasses. When I looked from the dovecot I could see far away a blue
line which I knew was the sea, and I grew furious to think that our enemies
had this secret conning-tower to rake our waterways.
Then I reflected that if that aeroplane came back the chances were ten to
one that I would be discovered. So through the afternoon I lay and prayed
for the coming of darkness, and glad I was when the sun went down over
the big western hills and the twilight haze crept over the moor. The
aeroplane was late. The gloaming was far advanced when I heard the beat
of wings and saw it volplaning downward to its home in the wood. Lights
twinkled for a bit and there was much coming and going from the house.
Then the dark fell, and silence.
Thank God it was a black night. The moon was well on its last quarter
and would not rise till late. My thirst was too great to allow me to tarry, so
about nine o’clock, so far as I could judge, I started to descend. It wasn’t
easy, and half-way down I heard the back door of the house open, and saw
the gleam of a lantern against the mill wall. For some agonizing minutes I
hung by the ivy and prayed that whoever it was would not come round by
the dovecot. Then the light disappeared, and I dropped as softly as I could
on to the hard soil of the yard.
 I crawled on my belly in the lee of a stone dyke till I reached the fringe of
trees which surrounded the house. If I had known how to do it I would have
tried to put that aeroplane out of action, but I realized that any attempt
would probably be futile. I was pretty certain that there would be some kind
of defence round the house, so I went through the wood on hands and
knees, feeling carefully every inch before me. It was as well, for presently I
came on a wire about two feet from the ground. If I had tripped over that, it
would doubtless have rung some bell in the house and I would have been
captured.
A hundred yards farther on I found another wire cunningly placed on the
edge of a small stream. Beyond that lay the moor, and in five minutes I was
deep in bracken and heather. Soon I was round the shoulder of the rise, in
the little glen from which the mill-lade flowed. Ten minutes later my face
was in the spring, and I was soaking down pints of the blessed water.
But I did not stop till I had put half a dozen miles between me and that
accursed dwelling.
 Chapter VII.
The Dry-Fly Fisherman

I sat down on a hill-top and took stock of my position. I wasn’t feeling

very happy, for my natural thankfulness at my escape was clouded by my
severe bodily discomfort. Those lentonite fumes had fairly poisoned me,
and the baking hours on the dovecot hadn’t helped matters. I had a crushing
headache, and felt as sick as a cat. Also my shoulder was in a bad way. At
first I thought it was only a bruise, but it seemed to be swelling, and I had
no use of my left arm.
My plan was to seek Mr Turnbull’s cottage, recover my garments, and
especially Scudder’s note-book, and then make for the main line and get
back to the south. It seemed to me that the sooner I got in touch with the
Foreign Office man, Sir Walter Bullivant, the better. I didn’t see how I
could get more proof than I had got already. He must just take or leave my
story, and anyway, with him I would be in better hands than those devilish
Germans. I had begun to feel quite kindly towards the British police.
It was a wonderful starry night, and I had not much difficulty about the
road. Sir Harry’s map had given me the lie of the land, and all I had to do
was to steer a point or two west of south-west to come to the stream where I
had met the roadman. In all these travels I never knew the names of the
places, but I believe this stream was no less than the upper waters of the
river Tweed. I calculated I must be about eighteen miles distant, and that
meant I could not get there before morning. So I must lie up a day
somewhere, for I was too outrageous a figure to be seen in the sunlight. I
had neither coat, waistcoat, collar, nor hat, my trousers were badly torn, and
my face and hands were black with the explosion. I daresay I had other
beauties, for my eyes felt as if they were furiously bloodshot. Altogether I
was no spectacle for God-fearing citizens to see on a highroad.
 Very soon after daybreak I made an attempt to clean myself in a hill burn,
and then approached a herd’s cottage, for I was feeling the need of food.
The herd was away from home, and his wife was alone, with no neighbour
for five miles. She was a decent old body, and a plucky one, for though she
got a fright when she saw me, she had an axe handy, and would have used it
on any evil-doer. I told her that I had had a fall—I didn’t say how—and she
saw by my looks that I was pretty sick. Like a true Samaritan she asked no
questions, but gave me a bowl of milk with a dash of whisky in it, and let
me sit for a little by her kitchen fire. She would have bathed my shoulder,
but it ached so badly that I would not let her touch it.
I don’t know what she took me for—a repentant burglar, perhaps; for
when I wanted to pay her for the milk and tendered a sovereign which was
the smallest coin I had, she shook her head and said something about
“giving it to them that had a right to it”. At this I protested so strongly that I
think she believed me honest, for she took the money and gave me a warm
new plaid for it, and an old hat of her man’s. She showed me how to wrap
the plaid around my shoulders, and when I left that cottage I was the living
image of the kind of Scotsman you see in the illustrations to Burns’s poems.
But at any rate I was more or less clad.
It was as well, for the weather changed before midday to a thick drizzle
of rain. I found shelter below an overhanging rock in the crook of a burn,
where a drift of dead brackens made a tolerable bed. There I managed to
sleep till nightfall, waking very cramped and wretched, with my shoulder
gnawing like a toothache. I ate the oatcake and cheese the old wife had
given me and set out again just before the darkening.
I pass over the miseries of that night among the wet hills. There were no
stars to steer by, and I had to do the best I could from my memory of the
map. Twice I lost my way, and I had some nasty falls into peat-bogs. I had
only about ten miles to go as the crow flies, but my mistakes made it nearer
twenty. The last bit was completed with set teeth and a very light and dizzy
head. But I managed it, and in the early dawn I was knocking at Mr
Turnbull’s door. The mist lay close and thick, and from the cottage I could
not see the highroad.
Mr Turnbull himself opened to me—sober and something more than
sober. He was primly dressed in an ancient but well-tended suit of black; he
had been shaved not later than the night before; he wore a linen collar; and
in his left hand he carried a pocket Bible. At first he did not recognize me.
“Whae are ye that comes stravaigin’ here on the Sabbath mornin’?” he
asked.
I had lost all count of the days. So the Sabbath was the reason for this
strange decorum.
My head was swimming so wildly that I could not frame a coherent
answer. But he recognized me, and he saw that I was ill.
“Hae ye got my specs?” he asked.
I fetched them out of my trouser pocket and gave him them.
“Ye’ll hae come for your jaicket and westcoat,” he said. “Come in-bye.
Losh, man, ye’re terrible dune i’ the legs. Haud up till I get ye to a chair.”
I perceived I was in for a bout of malaria. I had a good deal of fever in
my bones, and the wet night had brought it out, while my shoulder and the
effects of the fumes combined to make me feel pretty bad. Before I knew,
Mr Turnbull was helping me off with my clothes, and putting me to bed in
one of the two cupboards that lined the kitchen walls.
He was a true friend in need, that old roadman. His wife was dead years
ago, and since his daughter’s marriage he lived alone.
For the better part of ten days he did all the rough nursing I needed. I
simply wanted to be left in peace while the fever took its course, and when
my skin was cool again I found that the bout had more or less cured my
shoulder. But it was a baddish go, and though I was out of bed in five days,
it took me some time to get my legs again.
He went out each morning, leaving me milk for the day, and locking the
door behind him; and came in in the evening to sit silent in the chimney
corner. Not a soul came near the place. When I was getting better, he never
bothered me with a question. Several times he fetched me a two days’ old
Scotsman, and I noticed that the interest in the Portland Place murder
seemed to have died down. There was no mention of it, and I could find
very little about anything except a thing called the General Assembly—
some ecclesiastical spree, I gathered.
One day he produced my belt from a lockfast drawer. “There’s a terrible
heap o’ siller in’t,” he said. “Ye’d better coont it to see it’s a’ there.”
 He never even sought my name. I asked him if anybody had been around
making inquiries subsequent to my spell at the road-making.
“Ay, there was a man in a motor-cawr. He speired whae had ta’en my
place that day, and I let on I thocht him daft. But he keepit on at me, and
syne I said he maun be thinkin’ o’ my gude-brither frae the Cleuch that
whiles lent me a haun’. He was a wersh-lookin’ sowl, and I couldna
understand the half o’ his English tongue.”
I was getting restless those last days, and as soon as I felt myself fit I
decided to be off. That was not till the twelfth day of June, and as luck
would have it a drover went past that morning taking some cattle to Moffat.
He was a man named Hislop, a friend of Turnbull’s, and he came in to his
breakfast with us and offered to take me with him.
I made Turnbull accept five pounds for my lodging, and a hard job I had
of it. There never was a more independent being. He grew positively rude
when I pressed him, and shy and red, and took the money at last without a
thank you. When I told him how much I owed him, he grunted something
about “ae guid turn deservin’ anitherv” You would have thought from our
leave-taking that we had parted in disgust.
Hislop was a cheery soul, who chattered all the way over the pass and
down the sunny vale of Annan. I talked of Galloway markets and sheep
prices, and he made up his mind I was a “pack-shepherd” from those parts
—whatever that may be. My plaid and my old hat, as I have said, gave me a
fine theatrical Scots look. But driving cattle is a mortally slow job, and we
took the better part of the day to cover a dozen miles.
If I had not had such an anxious heart I would have enjoyed that time. It
was shining blue weather, with a constantly changing prospect of brown
hills and far green meadows, and a continual sound of larks and curlews
and falling streams. But I had no mind for the summer, and little for
Hislop’s conversation, for as the fateful fifteenth of June drew near I was
overweighed with the hopeless difficulties of my enterprise.
I got some dinner in a humble Moffat public-house, and walked the two
miles to the junction on the main line. The night express for the south was
not due till near midnight, and to fill up the time I went up on the hillside
and fell asleep, for the walk had tired me. I all but slept too long, and had to
run to the station and catch the train with two minutes to spare. The feel of
the hard third-class cushions and the smell of stale tobacco cheered me up
wonderfully. At any rate, I felt now that I was getting to grips with my job.
I was decanted at Crewe in the small hours and had to wait till six to get a
train for Birmingham. In the afternoon I got to Reading, and changed into a
local train which journeyed into the deeps of Berkshire. Presently I was in a
land of lush water-meadows and slow reedy streams. About eight o’clock in
the evening, a weary and travel-stained being—a cross between a farm-
labourer and a vet—with a checked black-and-white plaid over his arm (for
I did not dare to wear it south of the Border), descended at the little station
of Artinswell. There were several people on the platform, and I thought I
had better wait to ask my way till I was clear of the place.
The road led through a wood of great beeches and then into a shallow
valley, with the green backs of downs peeping over the distant trees. After
Scotland the air smelt heavy and flat, but infinitely sweet, for the limes and
chestnuts and lilac bushes were domes of blossom. Presently I came to a
bridge, below which a clear slow stream flowed between snowy beds of
water-buttercups. A little above it was a mill; and the lasher made a pleasant
cool sound in the scented dusk. Somehow the place soothed me and put me
at my ease. I fell to whistling as I looked into the green depths, and the tune
which came to my lips was “Annie Laurie”.
A fisherman came up from the waterside, and as he neared me he too
began to whistle. The tune was infectious, for he followed my suit. He was
a huge man in untidy old flannels and a wide-brimmed hat, with a canvas
bag slung on his shoulder. He nodded to me, and I thought I had never seen
a shrewder or better-tempered face. He leaned his delicate ten-foot split-
cane rod against the bridge, and looked with me at the water.
“Clear, isn’t it?” he said pleasantly. “I back our Kennet any day against
the Test. Look at that big fellow. Four pounds if he’s an ounce. But the
evening rise is over and you can’t tempt ’em.”
“I don’t see him,” said I.
“Look! There! A yard from the reeds just above that stickle.”
“I’ve got him now. You might swear he was a black stone.”
“So,” he said, and whistled another bar of “Annie Laurie”.
“Twisdon’s the name, isn’t it?” he said over his shoulder, his eyes still
fixed on the stream.
 “No,” I said. “I mean to say, Yes.” I had forgotten all about my alias.
“It’s a wise conspirator that knows his own name,” he observed, grinning
broadly at a moor-hen that emerged from the bridge’s shadow.
I stood up and looked at him, at the square, cleft jaw and broad, lined
brow and the firm folds of cheek, and began to think that here at last was an
ally worth having. His whimsical blue eyes seemed to go very deep.
Suddenly he frowned. “I call it disgraceful,” he said, raising his voice.
“Disgraceful that an able-bodied man like you should dare to beg. You can
get a meal from my kitchen, but you’ll get no money from me.”
A dog-cart was passing, driven by a young man who raised his whip to
salute the fisherman. When he had gone, he picked up his rod.
“That’s my house,” he said, pointing to a white gate a hundred yards on.
“Wait five minutes and then go round to the back door.” And with that he
left me.
I did as I was bidden. I found a pretty cottage with a lawn running down
to the stream, and a perfect jungle of guelder-rose and lilac flanking the
path. The back door stood open, and a grave butler was awaiting me.
“Come this way, sir,” he said, and he led me along a passage and up a
back staircase to a pleasant bedroom looking towards the river. There I
found a complete outfit laid out for me—dress clothes with all the fixings, a
brown flannel suit, shirts, collars, ties, shaving things and hair-brushes,
even a pair of patent shoes. “Sir Walter thought as how Mr Reggie’s things
would fit you, sir,” said the butler. “He keeps some clothes ’ere, for he
comes regular on the week-ends. There’s a bathroom next door, and I’ve
prepared a ’ot bath. Dinner in ’alf an hour, sir. You’ll ’ear the gong.”
The grave being withdrew, and I sat down in a chintz-covered easy-chair
and gaped. It was like a pantomime, to come suddenly out of beggardom
into this orderly comfort. Obviously Sir Walter believed in me, though why
he did I could not guess. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a wild,
haggard brown fellow, with a fortnight’s ragged beard, and dust in ears and
eyes, collarless, vulgarly shirted, with shapeless old tweed clothes and boots
that had not been cleaned for the better part of a month. I made a fine tramp
and a fair drover; and here I was ushered by a prim butler into this temple
of gracious ease. And the best of it was that they did not even know my
name.
 I resolved not to puzzle my head but to take the gifts the gods had
provided. I shaved and bathed luxuriously, and got into the dress clothes
and clean crackling shirt, which fitted me not so badly. By the time I had
finished the looking-glass showed a not unpersonable young man.
Sir Walter awaited me in a dusky dining-room where a little round table
was lit with silver candles. The sight of him—so respectable and
established and secure, the embodiment of law and government and all the
conventions—took me aback and made me feel an interloper. He couldn’t
know the truth about me, or he wouldn’t treat me like this. I simply could
not accept his hospitality on false pretences.
“I’m more obliged to you than I can say, but I’m bound to make things
clear,” I said. “I’m an innocent man, but I’m wanted by the police. I’ve got
to tell you this, and I won’t be surprised if you kick me out.”
He smiled. “That’s all right. Don’t let that interfere with your appetite.
We can talk about these things after dinner.” I never ate a meal with greater
relish, for I had had nothing all day but railway sandwiches. Sir Walter did
me proud, for we drank a good champagne and had some uncommon fine
port afterwards. It made me almost hysterical to be sitting there, waited on
by a footman and a sleek butler, and remember that I had been living for
three weeks like a brigand, with every man’s hand against me. I told Sir
Walter about tiger-fish in the Zambesi that bite off your fingers if you give
them a chance, and we discussed sport up and down the globe, for he had
hunted a bit in his day.
We went to his study for coffee, a jolly room full of books and trophies
and untidiness and comfort. I made up my mind that if ever I got rid of this
business and had a house of my own, I would create just such a room. Then
when the coffee-cups were cleared away, and we had got our cigars alight,
my host swung his long legs over the side of his chair and bade me get
started with my yarn.
“I’ve obeyed Harry’s instructions,” he said, “and the bribe he offered me
was that you would tell me something to wake me up. I’m ready, Mr
Hannay.”
I noticed with a start that he called me by my proper name.
I began at the very beginning. I told of my boredom in London, and the
night I had come back to find Scudder gibbering on my doorstep. I told him
all Scudder had told me about Karolides and the Foreign Office conference,
and that made him purse his lips and grin.
Then I got to the murder, and he grew solemn again. He heard all about
the milkman and my time in Galloway, and my deciphering Scudder’s notes
at the inn.
“You’ve got them here?” he asked sharply, and drew a long breath when I
whipped the little book from my pocket.
I said nothing of the contents. Then I described my meeting with Sir
Harry, and the speeches at the hall. At that he laughed uproariously.
“Harry talked dashed nonsense, did he? I quite believe it. He’s as good a
chap as ever breathed, but his idiot of an uncle has stuffed his head with
maggots. Go on, Mr Hannay.”
My day as roadman excited him a bit. He made me describe the two
fellows in the car very closely, and seemed to be raking back in his memory.
He grew merry again when he heard of the fate of that ass Jopley.
But the old man in the moorland house solemnized him. Again I had to
describe every detail of his appearance.
“Bland and bald-headed and hooded his eyes like a bird.... He sounds a
sinister wild-fowl! And you dynamited his hermitage, after he had saved
you from the police. Spirited piece of work, that!” Presently I reached the
end of my wanderings. He got up slowly, and looked down at me from the
hearthrug.
“You may dismiss the police from your mind,” he said. “You’re in no
danger from the law of this land.”
“Great Scot!” I cried. “Have they got the murderer?”
“No. But for the last fortnight they have dropped you from the list of
possibles.”
“Why?” I asked in amazement.
“Principally because I received a letter from Scudder. I knew something
of the man, and he did several jobs for me. He was half crank, half genius,
but he was wholly honest. The trouble about him was his partiality for
playing a lone hand. That made him pretty well useless in any Secret
Service—a pity, for he had uncommon gifts. I think he was the bravest man
in the world, for he was always shivering with fright, and yet nothing would
choke him off. I had a letter from him on the 31st of May.”
“But he had been dead a week by then.”
“The letter was written and posted on the 23rd. He evidently did not
anticipate an immediate decease. His communications usually took a week
to reach me, for they were sent under cover to Spain and then to Newcastle.
He had a mania, you know, for concealing his tracks.”
“What did he say?” I stammered.
“Nothing. Merely that he was in danger, but had found shelter with a
good friend, and that I would hear from him before the 15th of June. He
gave me no address, but said he was living near Portland Place. I think his
object was to clear you if anything happened. When I got it I went to
Scotland Yard, went over the details of the inquest, and concluded that you
were the friend. We made inquiries about you, Mr Hannay, and found you
were respectable. I thought I knew the motives for your disappearance—not
only the police, the other one too—and when I got Harry’s scrawl I guessed
at the rest. I have been expecting you any time this past week.”
You can imagine what a load this took off my mind. I felt a free man
once more, for I was now up against my country’s enemies only, and not
my country’s law.
“Now let us have the little note-book,” said Sir Walter.
It took us a good hour to work through it. I explained the cypher, and he
was jolly quick at picking it up. He emended my reading of it on several
points, but I had been fairly correct, on the whole. His face was very grave
before he had finished, and he sat silent for a while.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” he said at last. “He is right about one
thing—what is going to happen the day after tomorrow. How the devil can
it have got known? That is ugly enough in itself. But all this about war and
the Black Stone—it reads like some wild melodrama. If only I had more
confidence in Scudder’s judgement. The trouble about him was that he was
too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be
better than God meant it to be. He had a lot of odd biases, too. Jews, for
example, made him see red. Jews and the high finance.
“The Black Stone,” he repeated. “Der Schwarze Stein. It’s like a penny
novelette. And all this stuff about Karolides. That is the weak part of the
tale, for I happen to know that the virtuous Karolides is likely to outlast us
both. There is no State in Europe that wants him gone. Besides, he has just
been playing up to Berlin and Vienna and giving my Chief some uneasy
moments. No! Scudder has gone off the track there. Frankly, Hannay, I
don’t believe that part of his story. There’s some nasty business afoot, and
he found out too much and lost his life over it. But I am ready to take my
oath that it is ordinary spy work. A certain great European Power makes a
hobby of her spy system, and her methods are not too particular. Since she
pays by piecework her blackguards are not likely to stick at a murder or
two. They want our naval dispositions for their collection at the Marineamt;
but they will be pigeon-holed—nothing more.”
Just then the butler entered the room.
“There’s a trunk-call from London, Sir Walter. It’s Mr ’Eath, and he
wants to speak to you personally.”
My host went off to the telephone.
He returned in five minutes with a whitish face. “I apologize to the shade
of Scudder,” he said. “Karolides was shot dead this evening at a few
minutes after seven.”
 Chapter VIII.
The Coming of the Black Stone

I came down to breakfast next morning, after eight hours of blessed

dreamless sleep, to find Sir Walter decoding a telegram in the midst of
muffins and marmalade. His fresh rosiness of yesterday seemed a thought
tarnished.
“I had a busy hour on the telephone after you went to bed,” he said. “I
got my Chief to speak to the First Lord and the Secretary for War, and they
are bringing Royer over a day sooner. This wire clinches it. He will be in
London at five. Odd that the code word for a Sous-chef d’État Major-
General should be ‘Porker.’”
He directed me to the hot dishes and went on.
“Not that I think it will do much good. If your friends were clever enough
to find out the first arrangement they are clever enough to discover the
change. I would give my head to know where the leak is. We believed there
were only five men in England who knew about Royer’s visit, and you may
be certain there were fewer in France, for they manage these things better
there.”
While I ate he continued to talk, making me to my surprise a present of
his full confidence.
“Can the dispositions not be changed?” I asked.
“They could,” he said. “But we want to avoid that if possible. They are
the result of immense thought, and no alteration would be as good. Besides,
on one or two points change is simply impossible. Still, something could be
done, I suppose, if it were absolutely necessary. But you see the difficulty,
Hannay. Our enemies are not going to be such fools as to pick Royer’s
pocket or any childish game like that. They know that would mean a row
and put us on our guard. Their aim is to get the details without any one of
us knowing, so that Royer will go back to Paris in the belief that the whole
business is still deadly secret. If they can’t do that they fail, for, once we
suspect, they know that the whole thing must be altered.”
“Then we must stick by the Frenchman’s side till he is home again,” I
said. “If they thought they could get the information in Paris they would try
there. It means that they have some deep scheme on foot in London which
they reckon is going to win out.”
“Royer dines with my Chief, and then comes to my house where four
people will see him—Whittaker from the Admiralty, myself, Sir Arthur
Drew, and General Winstanley. The First Lord is ill, and has gone to
Sheringham. At my house he will get a certain document from Whittaker,
and after that he will be motored to Portsmouth where a destroyer will take
him to Havre. His journey is too important for the ordinary boat-train. He
will never be left unattended for a moment till he is safe on French soil. The
same with Whittaker till he meets Royer. That is the best we can do, and it’s
hard to see how there can be any miscarriage. But I don’t mind admitting
that I’m horribly nervous. This murder of Karolides will play the deuce in
the chancelleries of Europe.”
After breakfast he asked me if I could drive a car. “Well, you’ll be my
chauffeur today and wear Hudson’s rig. You’re about his size. You have a
hand in this business and we are taking no risks. There are desperate men
against us, who will not respect the country retreat of an overworked
official.”
When I first came to London I had bought a car and amused myself with
running about the south of England, so I knew something of the geography.
I took Sir Walter to town by the Bath Road and made good going. It was a
soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later, but it was
delicious enough swinging through the little towns with their freshly
watered streets, and past the summer gardens of the Thames valley. I landed
Sir Walter at his house in Queen Anne’s Gate punctually by half-past
eleven. The butler was coming up by train with the luggage.
The first thing he did was to take me round to Scotland Yard. There we
saw a prim gentleman, with a clean-shaven, lawyer’s face.
“I’ve brought you the Portland Place murderer,” was Sir Walter’s
introduction.
 The reply was a wry smile. “It would have been a welcome present,
Bullivant. This, I presume, is Mr Richard Hannay, who for some days
greatly interested my department.”
“Mr Hannay will interest it again. He has much to tell you, but not today.
For certain grave reasons his tale must wait for four hours. Then, I can
promise you, you will be entertained and possibly edified. I want you to
assure Mr Hannay that he will suffer no further inconvenience.”
This assurance was promptly given. “You can take up your life where
you left off,” I was told. “Your flat, which probably you no longer wish to
occupy, is waiting for you, and your man is still there. As you were never
publicly accused, we considered that there was no need of a public
exculpation. But on that, of course, you must please yourself.”
“We may want your assistance later on, MacGillivray,” Sir Walter said as
we left.
Then he turned me loose.
“Come and see me tomorrow, Hannay. I needn’t tell you to keep deadly
quiet. If I were you I would go to bed, for you must have considerable
arrears of sleep to overtake. You had better lie low, for if one of your Black
Stone friends saw you there might be trouble.”
I felt curiously at a loose end. At first it was very pleasant to be a free
man, able to go where I wanted without fearing anything. I had only been a
month under the ban of the law, and it was quite enough for me. I went to
the Savoy and ordered very carefully a very good luncheon, and then
smoked the best cigar the house could provide. But I was still feeling
nervous. When I saw anybody look at me in the lounge, I grew shy, and
wondered if they were thinking about the murder.
After that I took a taxi and drove miles away up into North London. I
walked back through fields and lines of villas and terraces and then slums
and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two hours. All the while my
restlessness was growing worse. I felt that great things, tremendous things,
were happening or about to happen, and I, who was the cog-wheel of the
whole business, was out of it. Royer would be landing at Dover, Sir Walter
would be making plans with the few people in England who were in the
secret, and somewhere in the darkness the Black Stone would be working. I
felt the sense of danger and impending calamity, and I had the curious
feeling, too, that I alone could avert it, alone could grapple with it. But I
was out of the game now. How could it be otherwise? It was not likely that
Cabinet Ministers and Admiralty Lords and Generals would admit me to
their councils.
I actually began to wish that I could run up against one of my three
enemies. That would lead to developments. I felt that I wanted enormously
to have a vulgar scrap with those gentry, where I could hit out and flatten
something. I was rapidly getting into a very bad temper.
I didn’t feel like going back to my flat. That had to be faced some time,
but as I still had sufficient money I thought I would put it off till next
morning, and go to a hotel for the night.
My irritation lasted through dinner, which I had at a restaurant in Jermyn
Street. I was no longer hungry, and let several courses pass untasted. I drank
the best part of a bottle of Burgundy, but it did nothing to cheer me. An
abominable restlessness had taken possession of me. Here was I, a very
ordinary fellow, with no particular brains, and yet I was convinced that
somehow I was needed to help this business through—that without me it
would all go to blazes. I told myself it was sheer silly conceit, that four or
five of the cleverest people living, with all the might of the British Empire
at their back, had the job in hand. Yet I couldn’t be convinced. It seemed as
if a voice kept speaking in my ear, telling me to be up and doing, or I would
never sleep again.
The upshot was that about half-past nine I made up my mind to go to
Queen Anne’s Gate. Very likely I would not be admitted, but it would ease
my conscience to try.
I walked down Jermyn Street, and at the corner of Duke Street passed a
group of young men. They were in evening dress, had been dining
somewhere, and were going on to a music-hall. One of them was Mr
Marmaduke Jopley.
He saw me and stopped short.
“By God, the murderer!” he cried. “Here, you fellows, hold him! That’s
Hannay, the man who did the Portland Place murder!” He gripped me by
the arm, and the others crowded round. I wasn’t looking for any trouble, but
my ill-temper made me play the fool. A policeman came up, and I should
have told him the truth, and, if he didn’t believe it, demanded to be taken to
Scotland Yard, or for that matter to the nearest police station. But a delay at
that moment seemed to me unendurable, and the sight of Marmie’s imbecile
face was more than I could bear. I let out with my left, and had the
satisfaction of seeing him measure his length in the gutter.
Then began an unholy row. They were all on me at once, and the
policeman took me in the rear. I got in one or two good blows, for I think,
with fair play, I could have licked the lot of them, but the policeman pinned
me behind, and one of them got his fingers on my throat.
Through a black cloud of rage I heard the officer of the law asking what
was the matter, and Marmie, between his broken teeth, declaring that I was
Hannay the murderer.
“Oh, damn it all,” I cried, “make the fellow shut up. I advise you to leave
me alone, constable. Scotland Yard knows all about me, and you’ll get a
proper wigging if you interfere with me.”
“You’ve got to come along of me, young man,” said the policeman. “I
saw you strike that gentleman crool ’ard. You began it too, for he wasn’t
doing nothing. I seen you. Best go quietly or I’ll have to fix you up.”
Exasperation and an overwhelming sense that at no cost must I delay
gave me the strength of a bull elephant. I fairly wrenched the constable off
his feet, floored the man who was gripping my collar, and set off at my best
pace down Duke Street. I heard a whistle being blown, and the rush of men
behind me.
I have a very fair turn of speed, and that night I had wings. In a jiffy I
was in Pall Mall and had turned down towards St James’s Park. I dodged
the policeman at the Palace gates, dived through a press of carriages at the
entrance to the Mall, and was making for the bridge before my pursuers had
crossed the roadway. In the open ways of the Park I put on a spurt. Happily
there were few people about and no one tried to stop me. I was staking all
on getting to Queen Anne’s Gate.
When I entered that quiet thoroughfare it seemed deserted. Sir Walter’s
house was in the narrow part, and outside it three or four motor-cars were
drawn up. I slackened speed some yards off and walked briskly up to the
door. If the butler refused me admission, or if he even delayed to open the
door, I was done.
He didn’t delay. I had scarcely rung before the door opened.
“I must see Sir Walter,” I panted. “My business is desperately important.”
 That butler was a great man. Without moving a muscle he held the door
open, and then shut it behind me. “Sir Walter is engaged, sir, and I have
orders to admit no one. Perhaps you will wait.”
The house was of the old-fashioned kind, with a wide hall and rooms on
both sides of it. At the far end was an alcove with a telephone and a couple
of chairs, and there the butler offered me a seat.
“See here,” I whispered. “There’s trouble about and I’m in it. But Sir
Walter knows, and I’m working for him. If anyone comes and asks if I am
here, tell him a lie.”
He nodded, and presently there was a noise of voices in the street, and a
furious ringing at the bell. I never admired a man more than that butler. He
opened the door, and with a face like a graven image waited to be
questioned. Then he gave them it. He told them whose house it was, and
what his orders were, and simply froze them off the doorstep. I could see it
all from my alcove, and it was better than any play.

I hadn’t waited long till there came another ring at the bell. The butler
made no bones about admitting this new visitor.
While he was taking off his coat I saw who it was. You couldn’t open a
newspaper or a magazine without seeing that face—the grey beard cut like
a spade, the firm fighting mouth, the blunt square nose, and the keen blue
eyes. I recognized the First Sea Lord, the man, they say, that made the new
British Navy.
He passed my alcove and was ushered into a room at the back of the hall.
As the door opened I could hear the sound of low voices. It shut, and I was
left alone again.
For twenty minutes I sat there, wondering what I was to do next. I was
still perfectly convinced that I was wanted, but when or how I had no
notion. I kept looking at my watch, and as the time crept on to half-past ten
I began to think that the conference must soon end. In a quarter of an hour
Royer should be speeding along the road to Portsmouth....
Then I heard a bell ring, and the butler appeared. The door of the back
room opened, and the First Sea Lord came out. He walked past me, and in
passing he glanced in my direction, and for a second we looked each other
in the face.
 Only for a second, but it was enough to make my heart jump. I had never
seen the great man before, and he had never seen me. But in that fraction of
time something sprang into his eyes, and that something was recognition.
You can’t mistake it. It is a flicker, a spark of light, a minute shade of
difference which means one thing and one thing only. It came involuntarily,
for in a moment it died, and he passed on. In a maze of wild fancies I heard
the street door close behind him.
I picked up the telephone book and looked up the number of his house.
We were connected at once, and I heard a servant’s voice.
“Is his Lordship at home?” I asked.
“His Lordship returned half an hour ago,” said the voice, “and has gone
to bed. He is not very well tonight. Will you leave a message, sir?”
I rang off and almost tumbled into a chair. My part in this business was
not yet ended. It had been a close shave, but I had been in time.
Not a moment could be lost, so I marched boldly to the door of that back
room and entered without knocking.
Five surprised faces looked up from a round table. There was Sir Walter,
and Drew the War Minister, whom I knew from his photographs. There was
a slim elderly man, who was probably Whittaker, the Admiralty official,
and there was General Winstanley, conspicuous from the long scar on his
forehead. Lastly, there was a short stout man with an iron-grey moustache
and bushy eyebrows, who had been arrested in the middle of a sentence.
Sir Walter’s face showed surprise and annoyance.
“This is Mr Hannay, of whom I have spoken to you,” he said
apologetically to the company. “I’m afraid, Hannay, this visit is ill-timed.”
I was getting back my coolness. “That remains to be seen, sir,” I said;
“but I think it may be in the nick of time. For God’s sake, gentlemen, tell
me who went out a minute ago?”
“Lord Alloa,” Sir Walter said, reddening with anger.
“It was not,” I cried; “it was his living image, but it was not Lord Alloa.
It was someone who recognized me, someone I have seen in the last month.
He had scarcely left the doorstep when I rang up Lord Alloa’s house and
was told he had come in half an hour before and had gone to bed.”
“Who—who—” someone stammered.
 “The Black Stone,” I cried, and I sat down in the chair so recently
vacated and looked round at five badly scared gentlemen.
 Chapter IX.
The Thirty-Nine Steps

“Nonsense!” said the official from the Admiralty.

Sir Walter got up and left the room while we looked blankly at the table.
He came back in ten minutes with a long face. “I have spoken to Alloa,” he
said. “Had him out of bed—very grumpy. He went straight home after
Mulross’s dinner.”
“But it’s madness,” broke in General Winstanley. “Do you mean to tell
me that that man came here and sat beside me for the best part of half an
hour and that I didn’t detect the imposture? Alloa must be out of his mind.”
“Don’t you see the cleverness of it?” I said. “You were too interested in
other things to have any eyes. You took Lord Alloa for granted. If it had
been anybody else you might have looked more closely, but it was natural
for him to be here, and that put you all to sleep.”
Then the Frenchman spoke, very slowly and in good English.
“The young man is right. His psychology is good. Our enemies have not
been foolish!”
He bent his wise brows on the assembly.
“I will tell you a tale,” he said. “It happened many years ago in Senegal. I
was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time used to go fishing for
big barbel in the river. A little Arab mare used to carry my luncheon basket
—one of the salted dun breed you got at Timbuctoo in the old days. Well,
one morning I had good sport, and the mare was unaccountably restless. I
could hear her whinnying and squealing and stamping her feet, and I kept
soothing her with my voice while my mind was intent on fish. I could see
her all the time, as I thought, out of a corner of my eye, tethered to a tree
twenty yards away. After a couple of hours I began to think of food. I
collected my fish in a tarpaulin bag, and moved down the stream towards
the mare, trolling my line. When I got up to her I flung the tarpaulin on her
back—”
He paused and looked round.
“It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and found
myself looking at a lion three feet off.... An old man-eater, that was the
terror of the village.... What was left of the mare, a mass of blood and bones
and hide, was behind him.”
“What happened?” I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a true yarn
when I heard it.
“I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also my
servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.” He held up
a hand which lacked three fingers.
“Consider,” he said. “The mare had been dead more than an hour, and the
brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never saw the kill, for I
was accustomed to the mare’s fretting, and I never marked her absence, for
my consciousness of her was only of something tawny, and the lion filled
that part. If I could blunder thus, gentlemen, in a land where men’s senses
are keen, why should we busy preoccupied urban folk not err also?”
Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.
“But I don’t see,” went on Winstanley. “Their object was to get these
dispositions without our knowing it. Now it only required one of us to
mention to Alloa our meeting tonight for the whole fraud to be exposed.”
Sir Walter laughed dryly. “The selection of Alloa shows their acumen.
Which of us was likely to speak to him about tonight? Or was he likely to
open the subject?”
I remembered the First Sea Lord’s reputation for taciturnity and shortness
of temper.
“The one thing that puzzles me,” said the General, “is what good his visit
here would do that spy fellow? He could not carry away several pages of
figures and strange names in his head.”
“That is not difficult,” the Frenchman replied. “A good spy is trained to
have a photographic memory. Like your own Macaulay. You noticed he said
nothing, but went through these papers again and again. I think we may
assume that he has every detail stamped on his mind. When I was younger I
could do the same trick.”
 “Well, I suppose there is nothing for it but to change the plans,” said Sir
Walter ruefully.
Whittaker was looking very glum. “Did you tell Lord Alloa what has
happened?” he asked. “No? Well, I can’t speak with absolute assurance, but
I’m nearly certain we can’t make any serious change unless we alter the
geography of England.”
“Another thing must be said,” it was Royer who spoke. “I talked freely
when that man was here. I told something of the military plans of my
Government. I was permitted to say so much. But that information would
be worth many millions to our enemies. No, my friends, I see no other way.
The man who came here and his confederates must be taken, and taken at
once.”
“Good God,” I cried, “and we have not a rag of a clue.”
“Besides,” said Whittaker, “there is the post. By this time the news will
be on its way.”
“No,” said the Frenchman. “You do not understand the habits of the spy.
He receives personally his reward, and he delivers personally his
intelligence. We in France know something of the breed. There is still a
chance, mes amis. These men must cross the sea, and there are ships to be
searched and ports to be watched. Believe me, the need is desperate for both
France and Britain.”
Royer’s grave good sense seemed to pull us together. He was the man of
action among fumblers. But I saw no hope in any face, and I felt none.
Where among the fifty millions of these islands and within a dozen hours
were we to lay hands on the three cleverest rogues in Europe?

Then suddenly I had an inspiration.

“Where is Scudder’s book?” I cried to Sir Walter. “Quick, man, I
remember something in it.”
He unlocked the door of a bureau and gave it to me.
I found the place. “Thirty-nine steps,” I read, and again, “Thirty-nine
steps—I counted them—High tide, 10.17 p.m.”
The Admiralty man was looking at me as if he thought I had gone mad.
 “Don’t you see it’s a clue,” I shouted. “Scudder knew where these
fellows laired—he knew where they were going to leave the country,
though he kept the name to himself. Tomorrow was the day, and it was
some place where high tide was at 10.17.”
“They may have gone tonight,” someone said.
“Not they. They have their own snug secret way, and they won’t be
hurried. I know Germans, and they are mad about working to a plan. Where
the devil can I get a book of Tide Tables?”
Whittaker brightened up. “It’s a chance,” he said. “Let’s go over to the
Admiralty.”
We got into two of the waiting motor-cars—all but Sir Walter, who went
off to Scotland Yard—to “mobilize MacGillivray”, so he said.
We marched through empty corridors and big bare chambers where the
charwomen were busy, till we reached a little room lined with books and
maps. A resident clerk was unearthed, who presently fetched from the
library the Admiralty Tide Tables. I sat at the desk and the others stood
round, for somehow or other I had got charge of this expedition.
It was no good. There were hundreds of entries, and so far as I could see
10.17 might cover fifty places. We had to find some way of narrowing the
possibilities.
I took my head in my hands and thought. There must be some way of
reading this riddle. What did Scudder mean by steps? I thought of dock
steps, but if he had meant that I didn’t think he would have mentioned the
number. It must be some place where there were several staircases, and one
marked out from the others by having thirty-nine steps.
Then I had a sudden thought, and hunted up all the steamer sailings.
There was no boat which left for the Continent at 10.17 p.m.
Why was high tide so important? If it was a harbour it must be some little
place where the tide mattered, or else it was a heavy-draught boat. But there
was no regular steamer sailing at that hour, and somehow I didn’t think they
would travel by a big boat from a regular harbour. So it must be some little
harbour where the tide was important, or perhaps no harbour at all.
But if it was a little port I couldn’t see what the steps signified. There
were no sets of staircases on any harbour that I had ever seen. It must be
some place which a particular staircase identified, and where the tide was
full at 10.17. On the whole it seemed to me that the place must be a bit of
open coast. But the staircases kept puzzling me.
Then I went back to wider considerations. Whereabouts would a man be
likely to leave for Germany, a man in a hurry, who wanted a speedy and a
secret passage? Not from any of the big harbours. And not from the
Channel or the West Coast or Scotland, for, remember, he was starting from
London. I measured the distance on the map, and tried to put myself in the
enemy’s shoes. I should try for Ostend or Antwerp or Rotterdam, and I
should sail from somewhere on the East Coast between Cromer and Dover.
All this was very loose guessing, and I don’t pretend it was ingenious or
scientific. I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied
I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don’t know if I can
explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after
they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty
right.
So I set out all my conclusions on a bit of Admiralty paper. They ran like
this:

FAIRLY CERTAIN.

(1) Place where there are several sets of stairs; one that
matters distinguished by having thirty-nine steps.
(2) Full tide at 10.17 p.m. Leaving shore only possible at full
tide.
(3) Steps not dock steps, and so place probably not harbour.
(4) No regular night steamer at 10.17. Means of transport
must be tramp (unlikely), yacht, or fishing-boat.

There my reasoning stopped. I made another list, which I headed

“Guessed”, but I was just as sure of the one as the other.

GUESSED.

(1) Place not harbour but open coast.

(2) Boat small—trawler, yacht, or launch.
(3) Place somewhere on East Coast between Cromer and
Dover.
 It struck me as odd that I should be sitting at that desk with a Cabinet
Minister, a Field-Marshal, two high Government officials, and a French
General watching me, while from the scribble of a dead man I was trying to
drag a secret which meant life or death for us.
Sir Walter had joined us, and presently MacGillivray arrived. He had sent
out instructions to watch the ports and railway stations for the three men
whom I had described to Sir Walter. Not that he or anybody else thought
that that would do much good.
“Here’s the most I can make of it,” I said. “We have got to find a place
where there are several staircases down to the beach, one of which has
thirty-nine steps. I think it’s a piece of open coast with biggish cliffs,
somewhere between the Wash and the Channel. Also it’s a place where full
tide is at 10.17 tomorrow night.”
Then an idea struck me. “Is there no Inspector of Coastguards or some
fellow like that who knows the East Coast?”
Whittaker said there was, and that he lived in Clapham. He went off in a
car to fetch him, and the rest of us sat about the little room and talked of
anything that came into our heads. I lit a pipe and went over the whole thing
again till my brain grew weary.
About one in the morning the coastguard man arrived. He was a fine old
fellow, with the look of a naval officer, and was desperately respectful to
the company. I left the War Minister to cross-examine him, for I felt he
would think it cheek in me to talk.
“We want you to tell us the places you know on the East Coast where
there are cliffs, and where several sets of steps run down to the beach.”
He thought for a bit. “What kind of steps do you mean, sir? There are
plenty of places with roads cut down through the cliffs, and most roads have
a step or two in them. Or do you mean regular staircases—all steps, so to
speak?”
Sir Arthur looked towards me. “We mean regular staircases,” I said.
He reflected a minute or two. “I don’t know that I can think of any. Wait
a second. There’s a place in Norfolk—Brattlesham—beside a golf-course,
where there are a couple of staircases, to let the gentlemen get a lost ball.”
“That’s not it,” I said.
 “Then there are plenty of Marine Parades, if that’s what you mean. Every
seaside resort has them.”
I shook my head. “It’s got to be more retired than that,” I said.
“Well, gentlemen, I can’t think of anywhere else. Of course, there’s the
Ruff—”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The big chalk headland in Kent, close to Bradgate. It’s got a lot of villas
on the top, and some of the houses have staircases down to a private beach.
It’s a very high-toned sort of place, and the residents there like to keep by
themselves.”
I tore open the Tide Tables and found Bradgate. High tide there was at
10.27 p.m. on the 15th of June.
“We’re on the scent at last,” I cried excitedly. “How can I find out what is
the tide at the Ruff?”
“I can tell you that, sir,” said the coastguard man. “I once was lent a
house there in this very month, and I used to go out at night to the deep-sea
fishing. The tide’s ten minutes before Bradgate.”
I closed the book and looked round at the company.
“If one of those staircases has thirty-nine steps we have solved the
mystery, gentlemen,” I said. “I want the loan of your car, Sir Walter, and a
map of the roads. If Mr MacGillivray will spare me ten minutes, I think we
can prepare something for tomorrow.”
It was ridiculous in me to take charge of the business like this, but they
didn’t seem to mind, and after all I had been in the show from the start.
Besides, I was used to rough jobs, and these eminent gentlemen were too
clever not to see it. It was General Royer who gave me my commission. “I
for one,” he said, “am content to leave the matter in Mr Hannay’s hands.”
By half-past three I was tearing past the moonlit hedgerows of Kent, with
MacGillivray’s best man on the seat beside me.
 Chapter X.
Various Parties Converging on the Sea

A pink and blue June morning found me at Bradgate looking from the
Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the Cock sands which
seemed the size of a bell-buoy. A couple of miles farther south and much
nearer the shore a small destroyer was anchored. Scaife, MacGillivray’s
man, who had been in the Navy, knew the boat, and told me her name and
her commander’s, so I sent off a wire to Sir Walter.
After breakfast Scaife got from a house-agent a key for the gates of the
staircases on the Ruff. I walked with him along the sands, and sat down in a
nook of the cliffs while he investigated the half-dozen of them. I didn’t
want to be seen, but the place at this hour was quite deserted, and all the
time I was on that beach I saw nothing but the seagulls.
It took him more than an hour to do the job, and when I saw him coming
towards me, conning a bit of paper, I can tell you my heart was in my
mouth. Everything depended, you see, on my guess proving right.
He read aloud the number of steps in the different stairs. “Thirty-four,
thirty-five, thirty-nine, forty-two, forty-seven,” and “twenty-one’ where the
cliffs grew lower. I almost got up and shouted.
We hurried back to the town and sent a wire to MacGillivray. I wanted
half a dozen men, and I directed them to divide themselves among different
specified hotels. Then Scaife set out to prospect the house at the head of the
thirty-nine steps.
He came back with news that both puzzled and reassured me. The house
was called Trafalgar Lodge, and belonged to an old gentleman called
Appleton—a retired stockbroker, the house-agent said. Mr Appleton was
there a good deal in the summer time, and was in residence now—had been
for the better part of a week. Scaife could pick up very little information
about him, except that he was a decent old fellow, who paid his bills
regularly, and was always good for a fiver for a local charity. Then Scaife
seemed to have penetrated to the back door of the house, pretending he was
an agent for sewing-machines. Only three servants were kept, a cook, a
parlour-maid, and a housemaid, and they were just the sort that you would
find in a respectable middle-class household. The cook was not the
gossiping kind, and had pretty soon shut the door in his face, but Scaife said
he was positive she knew nothing. Next door there was a new house
building which would give good cover for observation, and the villa on the
other side was to let, and its garden was rough and shrubby.
I borrowed Scaife’s telescope, and before lunch went for a walk along the
Ruff. I kept well behind the rows of villas, and found a good observation
point on the edge of the golf-course. There I had a view of the line of turf
along the cliff top, with seats placed at intervals, and the little square plots,
railed in and planted with bushes, whence the staircases descended to the
beach. I saw Trafalgar Lodge very plainly, a red-brick villa with a veranda,
a tennis lawn behind, and in front the ordinary seaside flower-garden full of
marguerites and scraggy geraniums. There was a flagstaff from which an
enormous Union Jack hung limply in the still air.
Presently I observed someone leave the house and saunter along the cliff.
When I got my glasses on him I saw it was an old man, wearing white
flannel trousers, a blue serge jacket, and a straw hat. He carried field-
glasses and a newspaper, and sat down on one of the iron seats and began to
read. Sometimes he would lay down the paper and turn his glasses on the
sea. He looked for a long time at the destroyer. I watched him for half an
hour, till he got up and went back to the house for his luncheon, when I
returned to the hotel for mine.
I wasn’t feeling very confident. This decent common-place dwelling was
not what I had expected. The man might be the bald archaeologist of that
horrible moorland farm, or he might not. He was exactly the kind of
satisfied old bird you will find in every suburb and every holiday place. If
you wanted a type of the perfectly harmless person you would probably
pitch on that.
But after lunch, as I sat in the hotel porch, I perked up, for I saw the thing
I had hoped for and had dreaded to miss. A yacht came up from the south
and dropped anchor pretty well opposite the Ruff. She seemed about a
hundred and fifty tons, and I saw she belonged to the Squadron from the
white ensign. So Scaife and I went down to the harbour and hired a
boatman for an afternoon’s fishing.
I spent a warm and peaceful afternoon. We caught between us about
twenty pounds of cod and lythe, and out in that dancing blue sea I took a
cheerier view of things. Above the white cliffs of the Ruff I saw the green
and red of the villas, and especially the great flagstaff of Trafalgar Lodge.
About four o’clock, when we had fished enough, I made the boatman row
us round the yacht, which lay like a delicate white bird, ready at a moment
to flee. Scaife said she must be a fast boat for her build, and that she was
pretty heavily engined.
Her name was the Ariadne, as I discovered from the cap of one of the
men who was polishing brasswork. I spoke to him, and got an answer in the
soft dialect of Essex. Another hand that came along passed me the time of
day in an unmistakable English tongue. Our boatman had an argument with
one of them about the weather, and for a few minutes we lay on our oars
close to the starboard bow.
Then the men suddenly disregarded us and bent their heads to their work
as an officer came along the deck. He was a pleasant, clean-looking young
fellow, and he put a question to us about our fishing in very good English.
But there could be no doubt about him. His close-cropped head and the cut
of his collar and tie never came out of England.
That did something to reassure me, but as we rowed back to Bradgate my
obstinate doubts would not be dismissed. The thing that worried me was the
reflection that my enemies knew that I had got my knowledge from
Scudder, and it was Scudder who had given me the clue to this place. If they
knew that Scudder had this clue, would they not be certain to change their
plans? Too much depended on their success for them to take any risks. The
whole question was how much they understood about Scudder’s
knowledge. I had talked confidently last night about Germans always
sticking to a scheme, but if they had any suspicions that I was on their track
they would be fools not to cover it. I wondered if the man last night had
seen that I recognized him. Somehow I did not think he had, and to that I
had clung. But the whole business had never seemed so difficult as that
afternoon when by all calculations I should have been rejoicing in assured
success.
 In the hotel I met the commander of the destroyer, to whom Scaife
introduced me, and with whom I had a few words. Then I thought I would
put in an hour or two watching Trafalgar Lodge.
I found a place farther up the hill, in the garden of an empty house. From
there I had a full view of the court, on which two figures were having a
game of tennis. One was the old man, whom I had already seen; the other
was a younger fellow, wearing some club colours in the scarf round his
middle. They played with tremendous zest, like two city gents who wanted
hard exercise to open their pores. You couldn’t conceive a more innocent
spectacle. They shouted and laughed and stopped for drinks, when a maid
brought out two tankards on a salver. I rubbed my eyes and asked myself if
I was not the most immortal fool on earth. Mystery and darkness had hung
about the men who hunted me over the Scotch moor in aeroplane and
motor-car, and notably about that infernal antiquarian. It was easy enough
to connect those folk with the knife that pinned Scudder to the floor, and
with fell designs on the world’s peace. But here were two guileless citizens
taking their innocuous exercise, and soon about to go indoors to a humdrum
dinner, where they would talk of market prices and the last cricket scores
and the gossip of their native Surbiton. I had been making a net to catch
vultures and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump thrushes had blundered
into it.
Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag of
golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn and was
welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they were chaffing him, and
their chaff sounded horribly English. Then the plump man, mopping his
brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must have a tub. I heard
his very words—“I’ve got into a proper lather,” he said. “This will bring
down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I’ll take you on tomorrow and give
you a stroke a hole.” You couldn’t find anything much more English than
that.
They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot. I had
been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might be acting; but if
they were, where was their audience? They didn’t know I was sitting thirty
yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply impossible to believe that these
three hearty fellows were anything but what they seemed—three ordinary,
game-playing, suburban Englishmen, wearisome, if you like, but sordidly
innocent.

And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was plump,
and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder’s notes;
and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at least one German officer.
I thought of Karolides lying dead and all Europe trembling on the edge of
earthquake, and the men I had left behind me in London who were waiting
anxiously for the events of the next hours. There was no doubt that hell was
afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had won, and if it survived this June
night would bank its winnings.
There seemed only one thing to do—go forward as if I had no doubts,
and if I was going to make a fool of myself to do it handsomely. Never in
my life have I faced a job with greater disinclination. I would rather in my
then mind have walked into a den of anarchists, each with his Browning
handy, or faced a charging lion with a popgun, than enter that happy home
of three cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their game was up. How
they would laugh at me!
But suddenly I remembered a thing I once heard in Rhodesia from old
Peter Pienaar. I have quoted Peter already in this narrative. He was the best
scout I ever knew, and before he had turned respectable he had been pretty
often on the windy side of the law, when he had been wanted badly by the
authorities. Peter once discussed with me the question of disguises, and he
had a theory which struck me at the time. He said, barring absolute
certainties like fingerprints, mere physical traits were very little use for
identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed at things
like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The only thing that
mattered was what Peter called “atmosphere”.
If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in
which he had been first observed, and—this is the important part—really
play up to these surroundings and behave as if he had never been out of
them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth. And he used to tell
a story of how he once borrowed a black coat and went to church and
shared the same hymn-book with the man that was looking for him. If that
man had seen him in decent company before he would have recognized
him; but he had only seen him snuffing the lights in a public-house with a
revolver.
The recollection of Peter’s talk gave me the first real comfort that I had
had that day. Peter had been a wise old bird, and these fellows I was after
were about the pick of the aviary. What if they were playing Peter’s game?
A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.
Again, there was that other maxim of Peter’s which had helped me when
I had been a roadman. “If you are playing a part, you will never keep it up
unless you convince yourself that you are it.” That would explain the game
of tennis. Those chaps didn’t need to act, they just turned a handle and
passed into another life, which came as naturally to them as the first. It
sounds a platitude, but Peter used to say that it was the big secret of all the
famous criminals.
It was now getting on for eight o’clock, and I went back and saw Scaife
to give him his instructions. I arranged with him how to place his men, and
then I went for a walk, for I didn’t feel up to any dinner. I went round the
deserted golf-course, and then to a point on the cliffs farther north beyond
the line of the villas.
On the little trim newly-made roads I met people in flannels coming back
from tennis and the beach, and a coastguard from the wireless station, and
donkeys and pierrots padding homewards. Out at sea in the blue dusk I saw
lights appear on the Ariadne and on the destroyer away to the south, and
beyond the Cock sands the bigger lights of steamers making for the
Thames. The whole scene was so peaceful and ordinary that I got more
dashed in spirits every second. It took all my resolution to stroll towards
Trafalgar Lodge about half-past nine.
On the way I got a piece of solid comfort from the sight of a greyhound
that was swinging along at a nursemaid’s heels. He reminded me of a dog I
used to have in Rhodesia, and of the time when I took him hunting with me
in the Pali hills. We were after rhebok, the dun kind, and I recollected how
we had followed one beast, and both he and I had clean lost it. A greyhound
works by sight, and my eyes are good enough, but that buck simply leaked
out of the landscape. Afterwards I found out how it managed it. Against the
grey rock of the kopjes it showed no more than a crow against a
thundercloud. It didn’t need to run away; all it had to do was to stand still
and melt into the background.
 Suddenly as these memories chased across my brain I thought of my
present case and applied the moral. The Black Stone didn’t need to bolt.
They were quietly absorbed into the landscape. I was on the right track, and
I jammed that down in my mind and vowed never to forget it. The last word
was with Peter Pienaar.
Scaife’s men would be posted now, but there was no sign of a soul. The
house stood as open as a market-place for anybody to observe. A three-foot
railing separated it from the cliff road; the windows on the ground-floor
were all open, and shaded lights and the low sound of voices revealed
where the occupants were finishing dinner. Everything was as public and
above-board as a charity bazaar. Feeling the greatest fool on earth, I opened
the gate and rang the bell.

A man of my sort, who has travelled about the world in rough places,
gets on perfectly well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the
lower. He understands them and they understand him. I was at home with
herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was sufficiently at my ease with
people like Sir Walter and the men I had met the night before. I can’t
explain why, but it is a fact. But what fellows like me don’t understand is
the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in
villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t
understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba.
When a trim parlour-maid opened the door, I could hardly find my voice.
I asked for Mr Appleton, and was ushered in. My plan had been to walk
straight into the dining-room, and by a sudden appearance wake in the men
that start of recognition which would confirm my theory. But when I found
myself in that neat hall the place mastered me. There were the golf-clubs
and tennis-rackets, the straw hats and caps, the rows of gloves, the sheaf of
walking-sticks, which you will find in ten thousand British homes. A stack
of neatly folded coats and waterproofs covered the top of an old oak chest;
there was a grandfather clock ticking; and some polished brass warming-
pans on the walls, and a barometer, and a print of Chiltern winning the St
Leger. The place was as orthodox as an Anglican church. When the maid
asked me for my name I gave it automatically, and was shown into the
smoking-room, on the right side of the hall.
 That room was even worse. I hadn’t time to examine it, but I could see
some framed group photographs above the mantelpiece, and I could have
sworn they were English public school or college. I had only one glance, for
I managed to pull myself together and go after the maid. But I was too late.
She had already entered the dining-room and given my name to her master,
and I had missed the chance of seeing how the three took it.
When I walked into the room the old man at the head of the table had
risen and turned round to meet me. He was in evening dress—a short coat
and black tie, as was the other, whom I called in my own mind the plump
one. The third, the dark fellow, wore a blue serge suit and a soft white
collar, and the colours of some club or school.
The old man’s manner was perfect. “Mr Hannay?” he said hesitatingly.
“Did you wish to see me? One moment, you fellows, and I’ll rejoin you. We
had better go to the smoking-room.”
Though I hadn’t an ounce of confidence in me, I forced myself to play
the game. I pulled up a chair and sat down on it.
“I think we have met before,” I said, “and I guess you know my
business.”
The light in the room was dim, but so far as I could see their faces, they
played the part of mystification very well.
“Maybe, maybe,” said the old man. “I haven’t a very good memory, but
I’m afraid you must tell me your errand, sir, for I really don’t know it.”
“Well, then,” I said, and all the time I seemed to myself to be talking pure
foolishness—“I have come to tell you that the game’s up. I have a warrant
for the arrest of you three gentlemen.”
“Arrest,” said the old man, and he looked really shocked. “Arrest! Good
God, what for?”
“For the murder of Franklin Scudder in London on the 23rd day of last
month.”
“I never heard the name before,” said the old man in a dazed voice.
One of the others spoke up. “That was the Portland Place murder. I read
about it. Good heavens, you must be mad, sir! Where do you come from?”
“Scotland Yard,” I said.
 After that for a minute there was utter silence. The old man was staring at
his plate and fumbling with a nut, the very model of innocent bewilderment.
Then the plump one spoke up. He stammered a little, like a man picking
his words.
“Don’t get flustered, uncle,” he said. “It is all a ridiculous mistake; but
these things happen sometimes, and we can easily set it right. It won’t be
hard to prove our innocence. I can show that I was out of the country on the
23rd of May, and Bob was in a nursing home. You were in London, but you
can explain what you were doing.”
“Right, Percy! Of course that’s easy enough. The 23rd! That was the day
after Agatha’s wedding. Let me see. What was I doing? I came up in the
morning from Woking, and lunched at the club with Charlie Symons. Then
—oh yes, I dined with the Fishmongers. I remember, for the punch didn’t
agree with me, and I was seedy next morning. Hang it all, there’s the cigar-
box I brought back from the dinner.” He pointed to an object on the table,
and laughed nervously.
“I think, sir,” said the young man, addressing me respectfully, “you will
see you are mistaken. We want to assist the law like all Englishmen, and we
don’t want Scotland Yard to be making fools of themselves. That’s so,
uncle?”
“Certainly, Bob.” The old fellow seemed to be recovering his voice.
“Certainly, we’ll do anything in our power to assist the authorities. But—
but this is a bit too much. I can’t get over it.”
“How Nellie will chuckle,” said the plump man. “She always said that
you would die of boredom because nothing ever happened to you. And now
you’ve got it thick and strong,” and he began to laugh very pleasantly.
“By Jove, yes. Just think of it! What a story to tell at the club. Really, Mr
Hannay, I suppose I should be angry, to show my innocence, but it’s too
funny! I almost forgive you the fright you gave me! You looked so glum, I
thought I might have been walking in my sleep and killing people.”
It couldn’t be acting, it was too confoundedly genuine. My heart went
into my boots, and my first impulse was to apologize and clear out. But I
told myself I must see it through, even though I was to be the laughing-
stock of Britain. The light from the dinner-table candlesticks was not very
good, and to cover my confusion I got up, walked to the door and switched
on the electric light. The sudden glare made them blink, and I stood
scanning the three faces.
Well, I made nothing of it. One was old and bald, one was stout, one was
dark and thin. There was nothing in their appearance to prevent them being
the three who had hunted me in Scotland, but there was nothing to identify
them. I simply can’t explain why I who, as a roadman, had looked into two
pairs of eyes, and as Ned Ainslie into another pair, why I, who have a good
memory and reasonable powers of observation, could find no satisfaction.
They seemed exactly what they professed to be, and I could not have sworn
to one of them.
There in that pleasant dining-room, with etchings on the walls, and a
picture of an old lady in a bib above the mantelpiece, I could see nothing to
connect them with the moorland desperadoes. There was a silver cigarette-
box beside me, and I saw that it had been won by Percival Appleton, Esq.,
of the St Bede’s Club, in a golf tournament. I had to keep a firm hold of
Peter Pienaar to prevent myself bolting out of that house.
“Well,” said the old man politely, “are you reassured by your scrutiny,
sir?”
I couldn’t find a word.
“I hope you’ll find it consistent with your duty to drop this ridiculous
business. I make no complaint, but you’ll see how annoying it must be to
respectable people.”
I shook my head.
“O Lord,” said the young man. “This is a bit too thick!”
“Do you propose to march us off to the police station?” asked the plump
one. “That might be the best way out of it, but I suppose you won’t be
content with the local branch. I have the right to ask to see your warrant, but
I don’t wish to cast any aspersions upon you. You are only doing your duty.
But you’ll admit it’s horribly awkward. What do you propose to do?”
There was nothing to do except to call in my men and have them
arrested, or to confess my blunder and clear out. I felt mesmerized by the
whole place, by the air of obvious innocence—not innocence merely, but
frank honest bewilderment and concern in the three faces.
“Oh, Peter Pienaar,” I groaned inwardly, and for a moment I was very
near damning myself for a fool and asking their pardon.
 “Meantime I vote we have a game of bridge,” said the plump one. “It will
give Mr Hannay time to think over things, and you know we have been
wanting a fourth player. Do you play, sir?”
I accepted as if it had been an ordinary invitation at the club. The whole
business had mesmerized me. We went into the smoking-room where a
card-table was set out, and I was offered things to smoke and drink. I took
my place at the table in a kind of dream. The window was open and the
moon was flooding the cliffs and sea with a great tide of yellow light. There
was moonshine, too, in my head. The three had recovered their composure,
and were talking easily—just the kind of slangy talk you will hear in any
golf club-house. I must have cut a rum figure, sitting there knitting my
brows with my eyes wandering.
My partner was the young dark one. I play a fair hand at bridge, but I
must have been rank bad that night. They saw that they had got me puzzled,
and that put them more than ever at their ease. I kept looking at their faces,
but they conveyed nothing to me. It was not that they looked different; they
were different. I clung desperately to the words of Peter Pienaar.

Then something awoke me.

The old man laid down his hand to light a cigar. He didn’t pick it up at
once, but sat back for a moment in his chair, with his fingers tapping on his
knees.
It was the movement I remembered when I had stood before him in the
moorland farm, with the pistols of his servants behind me.
A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one
that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I
didn’t, and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my
brain, and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o’clock.
The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their secrets.
The young one was the murderer. Now I saw cruelty and ruthlessness,
where before I had only seen good-humour. His knife, I made certain, had
skewered Scudder to the floor. His kind had put the bullet in Karolides.
The plump man’s features seemed to dislimn, and form again, as I looked
at them. He hadn’t a face, only a hundred masks that he could assume when
he pleased. That chap must have been a superb actor. Perhaps he had been
Lord Alloa of the night before; perhaps not; it didn’t matter. I wondered if
he was the fellow who had first tracked Scudder, and left his card on him.
Scudder had said he lisped, and I could imagine how the adoption of a lisp
might add terror.
But the old man was the pick of the lot. He was sheer brain, icy, cool,
calculating, as ruthless as a steam hammer. Now that my eyes were opened
I wondered where I had seen the benevolence. His jaw was like chilled
steel, and his eyes had the inhuman luminosity of a bird’s. I went on
playing, and every second a greater hate welled up in my heart. It almost
choked me, and I couldn’t answer when my partner spoke. Only a little
longer could I endure their company.
“Whew! Bob! Look at the time,” said the old man. “You’d better think
about catching your train. Bob’s got to go to town tonight,” he added,
turning to me. The voice rang now as false as hell. I looked at the clock, and
it was nearly half-past ten.
“I am afraid he must put off his journey,” I said.
“Oh, damn,” said the young man. “I thought you had dropped that rot.
I’ve simply got to go. You can have my address, and I’ll give any security
you like.”
“No,” I said, “you must stay.”
At that I think they must have realized that the game was desperate. Their
only chance had been to convince me that I was playing the fool, and that
had failed. But the old man spoke again.
“I’ll go bail for my nephew. That ought to content you, Mr Hannay.” Was
it fancy, or did I detect some halt in the smoothness of that voice?
There must have been, for as I glanced at him, his eyelids fell in that
hawk-like hood which fear had stamped on my memory.
I blew my whistle.
In an instant the lights were out. A pair of strong arms gripped me round
the waist, covering the pockets in which a man might be expected to carry a
pistol.
“Schnell, Franz,’ cried a voice, “das Boot, das Boot!” As it spoke I saw
two of my fellows emerge on the moonlit lawn.
 The young dark man leapt for the window, was through it, and over the
low fence before a hand could touch him. I grappled the old chap, and the
room seemed to fill with figures. I saw the plump one collared, but my eyes
were all for the out-of-doors, where Franz sped on over the road towards
the railed entrance to the beach stairs. One man followed him, but he had no
chance. The gate of the stairs locked behind the fugitive, and I stood
staring, with my hands on the old boy’s throat, for such a time as a man
might take to descend those steps to the sea.
Suddenly my prisoner broke from me and flung himself on the wall.
There was a click as if a lever had been pulled. Then came a low rumbling
far, far below the ground, and through the window I saw a cloud of chalky
dust pouring out of the shaft of the stairway.
Someone switched on the light.
The old man was looking at me with blazing eyes.
“He is safe,” he cried. “You cannot follow in time.... He is gone.... He has
triumphed.... Der Schwarze Stein ist in der Siegeskrone.”
There was more in those eyes than any common triumph. They had been
hooded like a bird of prey, and now they flamed with a hawk’s pride. A
white fanatic heat burned in them, and I realized for the first time the
terrible thing I had been up against. This man was more than a spy; in his
foul way he had been a patriot.
As the handcuffs clinked on his wrists I said my last word to him.
“I hope Franz will bear his triumph well. I ought to tell you that the
Ariadne for the last hour has been in our hands.”

Seven weeks later, as all the world knows, we went to war. I joined the
New Army the first week, and owing to my Matabele experience got a
captain’s commission straight off. But I had done my best service, I think,
before I put on khaki.
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