Appleby Plays Chicken Read Online Free PDF

already exhausted by a long struggle from valleys almost infinitely far below. It was a silly fancy; one that would make Timothy and Ian and the rest think him an absolute sap. But perhaps they thought him that already? David paused in his tracks, frowning and aware of some elusive doubt about himself, deep in his own mind. Perhaps, there was something queer in slipping away like this, without saying a word to anybody except the inescapable Faircloth. He turned and gazed back the way he had come, acknowledging an irrational sense that it would be cheerful to see one of Pettifor’s lot – Timothy, Arthur, even the infant Ogg – trudging towards him. But the emptiness was complete; it seemed to extend right to the light mist that now formed the horizon.
    He turned back and faced the Tor. A fine column of smoke was rising from the dark rude table of rock on the summit.

 
     
4
     
    He must have been wool-gathering even beyond his common measure, David thought. For he had experienced for a moment, as he glimpsed that thin pillar of smoke on Knack Tor, the feeling they call déjà-vu – ‘this has happened before’ – which usually comes to a mind off guard. Only it hadn’t been, as it usually is, a sense of the repetition of something from his more or less immediate personal past. It was like coming again upon a sight familiar to him thousands of years ago, when smoke did go up from hills like these, no doubt – and upon some decidedly unpleasant occasions.
    In other words – David told himself as he strode on – he had gone mildly dotty. It was what happened, one might suppose, if one went on imagining that one had a date with the Early Iron Age. In sober fact, what was happening up there was clearly a picnic; chaps preparing to boil a kettle or grill a chop. And this reminded him that he himself had set out without so much as a biscuit in his pocket. Perhaps he would pick up some sort of tea on the other side of the moor; and anyway there would be a good dinner when he got back to Nymph Monachorum.
    It was rather consciously that David pursued these prosaic reflections; he wanted to be sure that it wasn’t in the least a case of his imagination getting out of hand. And now he had probably better give the top of the Tor a miss. Whoever was there seemed to have scrambled to the very summit – which looked from here to be a slab of bare rock no bigger than a billiard table, although it was probably a good deal larger. It seemed a funny place to cook. But there was no reason why he should butt in on the proceedings at what would necessarily be very close quarters. It was a nuisance; he had rather looked forward to the final climb; but he’d skirt Knack Tor and make for the Loaf instead.
    This however was just what he didn’t do. He continued on his former path. Precisely why, he didn’t very clearly know. Perhaps he was recalling Faircloth’s praise of the view. Or perhaps he was vindicating himself to himself as a reasonably sociable being. To look in on the picnic wasn’t intrusive; in this lonely expanse it was merely companionable. He would climb up the rocks, exchange a word about the view with the people he found there, and then go on his way.
    So David continued to climb. When his path grew steeper he was careful not to slacken his pace. The little column of smoke was an inconsiderable affair, but his first reaction to it had only yielded to an obscure and fanciful sense that it was important – even that it was ominous or threatening. At least it was a tiny scrap of the unknown. Perhaps it was a good principle never to turn aside from that.
    The distance remaining to be covered was rather greater than he had thought. And now the smoke was fading. The kettle must have boiled, or the chops been done to a turn. It occurred to him that since he first saw the smoke there hadn’t really been time for either of these operations. Perhaps the smoke hadn’t represented cooking. Perhaps it had been a signal.