The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan John
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the drunken herd provided a diversion. He and his dog, which was attached by a rope to his waist, suddenly cascaded out of the carriage, landed on their heads on the track, and rolled some way down the bank towards the water. In the rescue which followed the dog bit somebody, for I could hear the sound of hard swearing. Presently they had forgotten me, and when after a quarter of a mile’s crawl I ventured to look back, the train had started again and was vanishing in the cutting.
I was in a wide semicircle of moorland, with the brown river as radius, and the high hills forming the northern circumference. There was not a sign or sound of a human being, only the plashing water and the interminable crying of curlews. Yet, oddly enough, for the first time I felt the terror of the hunted on me. It was not the police that I thought of, but the other folk, who knew that I knew Scudder’s secret and dared not let me live. I was certain that they would pursue me with a keenness and vigilance unknown to the British law, and that once their grip closed on me I should find no mercy.
I looked back, but there was nothing in the landscape. The sun glinted on the metals of the line and the wet stones in the stream, and you could not have found a more peaceful sight in the world. Nevertheless I started to run. Crouching low in the runnels of the bog, I ran till the sweat blinded my eyes. The mood did not leave me till I had reached the rim of mountain and flung myself panting on a ridge high above the young waters of the brown river.
From my vantage-ground I could scan the whole moor right away to the railway line and to the south of it where green fields took the place of heather. I have eyes like a hawk, but I could see nothing moving in the whole countryside. Then I looked east beyond the ridge and saw a new kind of landscape—shallow green valleys with plentiful fir plantations and the faint lines of dust which spoke of highroads. Last of all I looked into the blue May sky, and there I saw that which set my pulses racing …
Low down in the south a monoplane was climbing into the heavens. I was as certain as if I had been told that that aeroplane was looking for me, and that it did not belong to the police. For an hour or two I watched it from a pit of heather. It flew low along the hill-tops, and then in narrow circles over the valley up which I had come. Then it seemed to change its mind, rose to a great height, and flew away back to the south.
I did not like this espionage from the air, and I began to think less well of the countryside I had chosen for a refuge. These heather hills were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky, and I must find a different kind of sanctuary. I looked with more satisfaction to the green country beyond the ridge, for there I should find woods and stone houses.
About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man.
He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated—
‘As when a Gryphon through the wilderness
With winged step, o’er hill and moory dale
Pursues the Arimaspian.’
He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face.
‘Good evening to you,’ he said gravely. ‘It’s a fine night for the road.’
The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house.
‘Is that place an inn?’ I asked.
‘At your service,’ he said politely. ‘I am the landlord, Sir, and I hope you will stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have had no company for a week.’
I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my pipe. I began to detect an ally.
‘You’re young to be an innkeeper,’ I said.
‘My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there with my grandmother. It’s a slow job for a young man, and it wasn’t my choice of profession.’
‘Which was?’
He actually blushed. ‘I want to write books,’ he said.
‘And what better chance could you ask?’ I cried. ‘Man, I’ve often thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in the world.’
‘Not now,’ he said eagerly. ‘Maybe in the old days when you had pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of fat women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the shooting tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that. I want to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling and Conrad. But the most I’ve done yet is to get some verses printed in Chambers’s Journal.’ I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the brown hills.
‘I’ve knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn’t despise such a hermitage. D’you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you’re rubbing shoulders with it at this moment.’
‘That’s what Kipling says,’ he said, his eyes brightening, and he quoted some verse about ‘Romance bringing up the 9.15’.
‘Here’s a true tale for you then,’ I cried, ‘and a month from now you can make a novel out of it.’
Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley, who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang. They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and were now on my tracks.
I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn’t. I pictured a flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the Portland Place murder. ‘You’re looking for adventure,’ I cried; ‘well, you’ve found it here. The devils are after me, and the police are after them. It’s a race that I mean to win.’
‘By God!’ he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, ‘it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.’
‘You believe me,’ I said gratefully.
‘Of course I do,’ and he held out his hand. ‘I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.’
He was very young, but he was the man for my money.
‘I think they’re off my track for the moment, but I must lie close for a couple of days. Can you take me in?’
He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the house. ‘You can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I’ll see that nobody blabs, either. And you’ll give me some more material about your adventures?’
As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an engine. There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend, the monoplane.
He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook over the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was stacked with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw the grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder’s note-book.
He came back at midday with the Scotsman. There was nothing in it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a repetition