The Thirty-Nine Steps

of the Liter

ndon 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 pap

well filled with jottings, chiefly figures, though now and then a name was printed in. For example, I

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

re 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 d

e 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 too

art 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 saun

ight-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 h

t 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 m

lds, 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

ed 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.

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 pas

tion-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 gr

te that I mistrusted. The man was asleep, and on the cushions beside him was that m

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 we

or 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

He fixed me with a wandering glance, kicked his dog vicio

in' a teetotaller,' he o

hat in him I should have

ok the pledge last Martinmas, and I havena touched a drop o' wh

he seat, and burrowed a fr

id better than hell fire, and twae een

id it?'

ip-nippin' a' day at this brandy, and I doubt I'll no be weel for a fortnicht.' Hi

at the end of a culvert which spanned a brawling porter-coloured river. I looked out and saw that every carriage window was closed an

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 shel

ds 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

nd 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 Sc

ve 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 ey

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 plenti

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

. These heather hills were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky, and I must find a different kind of sanctuar

stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pa

with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small bo

phon through

ep, o'er hill

the Ar

g on the keystone, and I saw a

e said gravely. 'It's a

d of some savoury roast fl

lace an in

ord, Sir, and I hope you will stay the night, for to

et of the bridge and filled my

to be an innke

I live there with my grandmother. It's a slow job for

ch w

d. 'I want to writ

d. 'Man, I've often thought that an innkeeper

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, a

age. D'you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gen

eyes brightening, and he quoted some ve

,' I cried, 'and a month from no

ered 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.

erful 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

s breath in sharply, 'it is all pu

me,' I said

. 'I believe everything out of the common.

, but he was the

e moment, but I must lie close for a

an lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I'll see that nobody b

the beat of an engine. There silhouetted again

. 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 usual

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,

scovered what were the nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word, and when I thought of the odd mill

cudder had said it was the key to the Karolides busi

alphabet, and so represented by X in the cypher. E was XXI, and so on. 'Czechenyi' gave me the numerals fo

with a whitish face and fing

wards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was the sound of people al

er slipped into the room, his

out you and said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they described you jolly well, down to your boots and shirt. I told

with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and lisped in his talk

te these words in German as i

fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now, especially as Karolides is

ly, so that it looked like a

d in my bedroom, and ask them to re

ehind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was slim, the

The dark fellow went as white as death and cursed like blazes, and the fat one whistled and

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

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 compar

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

tter idea. I scribbled a line of thanks to my host, opened the window, and dropped quietly into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far side of

lost sight of the inn, but the wind see