THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 June 1939, Page 10

THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

(PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.) (COPYRIGHT.)

By

JOHN BUCHAN

(Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada.)

CHAPTER 11. (Continued). “Now I’ll tell you what I want you to do,” I said. "Get on your bicycle and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chiei Constable. Describe the two men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do with the London muraer. You can invent reasons. The two will come back, never fear. Not tonight, for they’ll follow me forty miles along the road, but first thing tomorrow 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 there were compared to this I was now engaged in. When he went to bed I sat up an finished Scudder. 1 smoked in a 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 opppsite 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 the gravel outside me 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 dyke, 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, ana 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.

You may picture' me driving that forty h.p. car for all she was worm over the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing back at first over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to thd next turning; then driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to keep on the highway. For 1 was thinking desperately of what I had found in Scudder’s poc-ket-book.

The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale, and instead of being once-bit-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely. Why, I don’t know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if you understand me, had been in a queer' way true also in spirit.. The fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn’t blame Scudder fd'r keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was chiefly greedy about. The whole siory was in the notes — with gaps, you understand, which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down his authorities too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed were authorities and there was a man. Ducrosne, who got five out of’ a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort who got three. The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book —these, and one queer phrase which occurred half-a-dozen times in brackets ("Thirty-Nine Steps”) was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran—("Thirty-Nine steps, I counted them —high tide 10.17 p.m.”). I could make nothing of that. The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing a war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged, said Scudder, ever since February, 1912. Karolides was going to be the occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his checks on June 14, two weeks and four days from that May morning. I gathered from Scudder’s notes that nothing on earth could prevent that. His talk of Epirote guards that would skin their own grandmothers was all billy-O. The second thing was that this war was going to come as a mighty surprise to Britain. Karolides’ death would set the Balkans by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum. Russia wouldn't like that, and there would be high words. But Berlin would play the peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till suddenly she would find a good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a pretty good one, too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark. While we were talking about the goodwill and good intentions of Germany our coast would be silently ringed with mines, and submarines would be waiting for every battleship. But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to happen on June 15. I would never have grasped this if I hadn’t once happened to meet a French staff officer, coming back from West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in spite of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real working alliance between France and Britain, and that the two General Staffs met now and then, and made plans for joint action in case of war. Well, in

June a very great swell was coming over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on. mobilisation.

But on the fifteenth day of June there were to be others in London—others, at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call them collectively the "Black Stone.” They .represented not our Allies, but our deadly foe; and the information, destined for France, was to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used remember —used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes, suddenly in the darkness of a summer night. This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my brain as I swung in the big touring car from glen to glen. My first impulse had been to write to the Prime Minister, but a little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who would believe my tale? I must snow a sign, some token in proof, and Heaven knew what they could be. Above all, I must keep going myself, rejdy to act when things got riper, and that was going to be no light job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me, and the watchers of the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on my trail.

CHAPTER HI. I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by the sun, for I remembered from the map that if I went north I would come into a region of coal-pits aqd industrial towns. Presently I was down from Ine moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of a river. For miles 1 ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of tlje trees I saw a great castle. I swung through little old thatched villages, and over peaceful lowland streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were those who sought my life; and that in a month’s time, unless I had the almightiest of luck, these round country faces would be pinched and staring, and men would be lying dead, in English fields. About midday I entered a long, straggling village, and had a mind to stop and eat. Half-way down was tne Post Office, and on the steps of it stood the post-mistress and a policeman hard at work conning a telegram. When they saw me they wakened up, and tne policeman advanced' with raised hand, and cried on me to stop. I nearly was fool enough to obey. Then it flashed upon me that the wire had to do with me; that my friends at the inn had come to an understanding, and were united in- desiring to see more of me, and that it had been easy enough for them to wire the description of me and the car to thirty villages through which I might pass. 1 released the brakes just in time. As it was, the policeman made a claw at the hood, and only dropped, off when he got my left in his eye.

1 saw that the main roads were no place fori me, and turned into the byways. It wasn’t an easy job with-' out a map, for there was the risk of getting on to a farm road and ending in a duckpond or a stable-yard, and I couldn’t afford that kind of delay. I began to see what an ass I had been to steal the car. The big green brute would be the safest kind of clue to me over the breadth of Scotland. If I left it and took to my feet, it would be discovered in an hour or two, and I would get no start in the race.

The immediate thing to do was to get to the loneliest roads. These I soon found when I struck up the tributary of the big river, and got into a glen with steep hills all about me, and a cork-screw road at the end which climbed over a pass. Here I met nobody, but it was taking me too far north, so I slewed east along a bad track and finally struck a big doubleline railway. Away below me I saw another broadish valley, and it occurred to me that if I crossed it I might find some remote inn to pass the night. The evening was now drawing in, and I was furiously hungry, for I had eaten nothing since gry ,for I had eaten nothing since breakfast except a couple of buns' I had bought from a baker’s cart. Just then I heard a noise in the sky, and low and behold, there was that infernal aeroplane, flying low, about a dozen miles to the south and rapidly coming towards me. I had the sense to remember that on a bare moor 1 was at the aeroplane's mercy, and that my only chance was to get the leafy cover of the valley. Down the hill I went like blue lightning, screwing my head round, whenever 1 dared, to watch that damned flying machine. Soon I was on a road between hedges, and dipping to the deep-cut glen of a stream. Then came a bit of thick wood, where I slackened speed.

Suddenly on my left I heard the hoot of another car. and realised to my horror that 1 was almost upon a couple of gateposts, through which a private road debouched on the highway. My horn gave an agonised roar, but it was too late. I clapped on mj’ brakes, but my impetus was too great, and there before me a car was sliding athwart my course. In a second there would have been the deuce of a wreck. I did the only thing possible, and ran slap into the hedge on the right, trusting to find something soft beyond. But there I was mistaken. My car slithered through the hedge like butter, and then gave a sickening plunge forward. I saw what was coming! leapt on the seat and would have jumped out. But a branch of hawthorn got me in the chest, ■ lifted me up and held me, while a ton or two of expensive metal slipped below me, bucked and pitched, and then dropped with an almighty smash fifty feet to the bed of the stream. Slowy the thorn let me go. I subsided first on the hedge, and then very gently on a bower of nettles. As I scrambled to my feet a hand took me by the arm, and a sympathetic and voice asked me if I were hurt. (To be Continued.)