The Thirty-Nine Steps (4 page)

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, 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 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 bypath 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.