The Thirty-Nine Steps Read Online Free PDF

thought I had still a
     good bit of a start, for, as I reasoned, it would take some hours to fix the blame
     on me, and several more to identify the fellow who got on board the train at St Pancras.
    It was the same jolly, clear spring weather, and I simply could not contrive to feel
     careworn. Indeed I was in better spirits than I had been for months. Over a long ridge
     of moorland I took my road, skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called
     Cairnsmore of Fleet. Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere, and the links
     of green pasture by the streams were dotted with young lambs. All the slackness of
     the past months was slipping from my bones, and I stepped out like a four-year-old.
     By-and-by I came to a swell of moorland which dipped to the vale of a little river,
     and a mile away in the heather I saw the smoke of a train.
    The station, when I reached it, proved to be ideal for my purpose. The moor surged
     up around it and left room only for the single line, the slender siding, a waiting-room,
     an office, the station-master’s cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william.
     There seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the desolation the waves
     of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach half a mile away. I waited in the deep
     heather till I saw the smoke of an east-going train on the horizon. Then I approached
     the tiny booking-office and took a ticket for Dumfries.
    The only occupants of the carriage were an old shepherd and his dog—a wall-eyed brute
     that I mistrusted. The man was asleep, and on the cushions beside him was that morning’s
Scotsman
. Eagerly I seized on it, for I fancied it would tell me something.
    There were two columns about the Portland Place Murder, as it was called. My man Paddock
     had given the alarm and had the milkman arrested. Poor devil, it looked as if the
     latter had earned his sovereign hardly; but for me he had been cheap at the price,
     for he seemed to have occupied the police for the better part of the day. In the latest
     news I found a further instalment of the story. The milkman had been released, I read,
     and the true criminal, about whose identity the police were reticent, was believed
     to have got away from London by one of the northern lines. There was a short note
     about me as the owner of the flat. I guessed the police had stuck that in, as a clumsy
     contrivance to persuade me that I was unsuspected.
    There was nothing else in the paper, nothing about foreign politics or Karolides,
     or the things that had interested Scudder. I laid it down, and found that we were
     approaching the station at which I had got out yesterday. The potato-digging station-master
     had been gingered up into some activity, for the west-going train was waiting to let
     us pass, and from it had descended three men who were asking him questions. I supposed
     that they were the local police, who had been stirred up by Scotland Yard, and had
     traced me as far as this one-horse siding. Sitting well back in the shadow I watched
     them carefully. One of them had a book, and took down notes. The old potato-digger
     seemed to have turned peevish, but the child who had collected my ticket was talking
     volubly. All the party looked out across the moor where the white road departed. I
     hoped they were going to take up my tracks there.
    As we moved away from that station my companion woke up. He fixed me with a wandering
     glance, kicked his dog viciously, and inquired where he was. Clearly he was very drunk.
    ‘That’s what comes o’ bein’ a teetotaller,’ he observed in bitter regret.
    I expressed my surprise that in him I should have met a blue-ribbon stalwart.
    ‘Ay, but I’m a strong teetotaller,’ he said pugnaciously. ‘I took the pledge last
     Martinmas, and I havena touched a drop o’ whisky sinsyne. Not even at Hogmanay, though
     I was sair temptit.’
    He swung his heels up on the seat, and burrowed a frowsy head into