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 tablecloth
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
overthick with population.
A search in Bradshaw informed me that a train left
St Pancras at seven-ten, which would land me at a 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 seven-thirty 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 scrubby moustache, dressed in 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.
"Good-bye, 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 Newtown 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 tu 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 guard!" 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
twelvemonth, 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 cipher 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 ciphers. 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 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 ma- chine, 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, but they took no notice
of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then to a
great, wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high, blue hills showing
northwards.
About five o'clock the carriage had emptied and I
was left alone as I had hoped. I got out at the next station, a little place
whose name I scarcely noted, set right in the heart of a bog. It reminded me of
one of those forotten 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 no questions, for they had the perfect breeding of all dwellers in the
wilds, but I could see they set me down as some 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.
Nestling 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 the better part of the day. In the stop-press news I
found a further installment 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 stutter, and once more
laid its heavy hand on him.
My plan had been to get out at some station down
the line, hut 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 that the guard and several passengers gathered round the open
carriage door and stared in my direction. I could not have made a more public
departure if I had left with a bugler and a brassband.
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 semi-circle 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 back over the valley up which I
had come. Then it seemed to change 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
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 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 wood 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've 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
nine-fifteen'.
'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 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've 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 bed-ridden. 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 lookout 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 cipher.
As I told you, it was a numerical cipher, 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 me to
try it on his cipher.
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 cipher. 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
acquascutums 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 whiskys and
sodas. They asked about you and said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh I 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 Newtown 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 to-night, for they'll follow me forty miles
along road, but first thing to-morrow 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 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 die 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 dike, 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.
