Page 36 - the-thirty-nine-steps

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 wa-
ter. 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 ter-
ror 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 se-
cret 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

36 The Thirty-Nine Steps