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 winged 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 bringing 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.