The Thirty-Nine Steps
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