The Thirty-Nine Steps
“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