The Thirty-Nine Steps Read Online Free PDF Page A

and woke at
     Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into the slow Galloway train. There was
     a man on the platform whose looks I didn’t like, but he never glanced at me, and when
     I caught sight of myself in the mirror of an automatic machine I didn’t wonder. With
     my brown face, my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was the very model of one of the hill
     farmers who were crowding into the third-class carriages.
    I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes. They had come
     from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of prices. I heard accounts of
     how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters.
     Above half the men had lunched heavily and were highly flavoured with whisky, but
     they took no notice of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and
     then to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills showing
     northwards.
    About five o’clock the carriage had emptied, and I was left alone as I had hoped.
     I got out at the next station, a little place whose name I scarcely noted, set right
     in the heart of a bog. It reminded me of one of those forgotten little stations in
     the Karroo. An old station-master was digging in his garden, and with his spade over
     his shoulder sauntered to the train, took charge of a parcel, and went back to his
     potatoes. A child of ten received my ticket, and I emerged on a white road that straggled
     over the brown moor.
    It was a gorgeous spring evening, with every hill showing as clear as a cut amethyst.
     The air had the queer, rooty smell of bogs, but it was as fresh as mid-ocean, and
     it had the strangest effect on my spirits. I actually felt light-hearted. I might
     have been a boy out for a spring holiday tramp, instead of a man of thirty-seven very
     much wanted by the police. I felt just as I used to feel when I was starting for a
     big trek on a frosty morning on the high veld. If you believe me, I swung along that
     road whistling. There was no plan of campaign in my head, only just to go on and on
     in this blessed, honest-smelling hill country, for every mile put me in better humour
     with myself.
    In a roadside planting I cut a walking-stick of hazel, and presently struck off the
     highway up a bypath which followed the glen of a brawling stream. I reckoned that
     I was still far ahead of any pursuit, and for that night might please myself. It was
     some hours since I had tasted food, and I was getting very hungry when I came to a
     herd’s cottage set in a nook beside a waterfall. A brown-faced woman was standing
     by the door, and greeted me with the kindly shyness of moorland places. When I asked
     for a night’s lodging she said I was welcome to the ‘bed in the loft’, and very soon
     she set before me a hearty meal of ham and eggs, scones, and thick sweet milk.
    At the darkening her man came in from the hills, a lean giant, who in one step covered
     as much ground as three paces of ordinary mortals. They asked me no questions, for
     they had the perfect breeding of all dwellers in the wilds, but I could see they set
     me down as a kind of dealer, and I took some trouble to confirm their view. I spoke
     a lot about cattle, of which my host knew little, and I picked up from him a good
     deal about the local Galloway markets, which I tucked away in my memory for future
     use. At ten I was nodding in my chair, and the ‘bed in the loft’ received a weary
     man who never opened his eyes till five o’clock set the little homestead a-going once
     more.
    They refused any payment, and by six I had breakfasted and was striding southwards
     again. My notion was to return to the railway line a station or two farther on than
     the place where I had alighted yesterday and to double back. I reckoned that that
     was the safest way, for the police would naturally assume that I was always making
     farther from London in the direction of some western port. I