Appleby Plays Chicken Read Online Free PDF Page B

David swung his stick and advanced with long strides. This was another notion out of his reading – rather earlier reading than that prompting him to fancies of sinister sacrifice on primitive altars. Reading, probably, about Red Indians. And it wasn’t just a matter of beacons. There was a language of smoke. You manipulated a blanket over a smoky fire, and the result was a sort of Morse code done in puffs of the stuff. But there had been no puffs about the smoke from Knack Tor; just a single column going straight up in this still air. A signal like that would carry a long way. And it would need to, in this solitude. Apart from whoever was on top, there probably wasn’t another human being within miles.
    But this reflection had no sooner come to David than it was falsified by a single sharp report from somewhere ahead of him. Up here too there must be a chap out shooting. Goodness knew what, at this time of year. Perhaps there were hares. You could shoot a hare at any time. Except – he remembered Timothy telling him impressively – when there was an order to the contrary by the lord-lieutenant. Or perhaps that was in Ireland, where Timothy had grand relations. Yet Ireland could hardly run to lords-lieutenant nowadays…
    That David Henchman’s mind wandered in this way as he climbed shows that his feeling of there being something odd about the smoke on top of Knack Tor didn’t go very deep. And certainly he wasn’t prepared for what he found at the end of his final scramble. Not that scramble was quite the right word. In a small way, there was something like a real spot of climbing involved at the end – at any rate on the side from which he approached the summit. Nearly twenty feet of more or less perpendicular rock had to be negotiated, and although he found plenty of hand and toe holds he had to bring some concentration to the job. It didn’t feel exactly alarming, but he wasn’t an expert. He ended up rather ingloriously by crawling over the final verge on his belly.
    His first impression was that somebody else had completed this operation immediately before him. This of course was nonsense. He had been entirely alone. He was staring, all the same, at the soles of a pair of shoes. They were a man’s shoes, with studs in them. David moved his head – it was an immediate and instinctive response to finding these things pretty well shoved in his face – and this gave him a view of the uppers. He was aware of pronouncing to himself the inconsequent verdict that these looked very good shoes. Then it struck him that they were the wrong way up, if this was really somebody doing a scramble like his own. The toes pointed skywards. David wriggled his thighs over the edge. He must have given his tummy a twist, he thought. It didn’t feel nice inside.
    A chap having a nap. That was it – nothing more. This great rock-structure on top of the Tor had the form of a shallow basin, and it was a perfect suntrap on this mild spring day. So here was somebody asleep. David stood up. At his feet an elderly man was lying face upwards on the rock. One arm was flung out oddly, the hand clasped over some small bright metal object. And the man had a hole in the middle of his forehead.
    His tummy, David thought, had been ahead of his eye and his brain. Fortunately it didn’t continue its demonstration. David took his eyes from the dead man – for he was certain he was that – and looked about him. In the very middle of this rocky saucer lay a little heap of ashes, with a tiny wisp of smoke still curling above them. That was what he had seen. He remembered that he had heard something too. But what was it – He struggled with his memory and found that it had gone queer – which showed that you do get a bit of a shock when this sort of thing happens. What he had heard, of course, was the shot. And the glittering thing in the man’s right hand was a revolver. He had killed himself. It had happened only a couple of minutes ago.