Chapter Three. The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper

The Thirty-Nine Steps

by John Buchan

I had a solemn time travelling north that day. It was fine May
weather, with the hawthorn flowering on every hedge, and I asked
myself why, when I was still a free man, I had stayed on in London
and not got the good of this heavenly country. I didn't dare face
the restaurant car, but I got a luncheon-basket at Leeds and shared
it with the fat woman. Also I got the morning's papers, with news
about starters for the Derby and the beginning of the cricket season,
and some paragraphs about how Balkan affairs were settling down and a
British squadron was going to Kiel.

When I had done with them I got out Scudder's little black
pocket-book and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings,
chiefly figures, though now and then a name was printed in. For
example, I found the words 'Hofgaard', 'Luneville', and 'Avocado'
pretty often, and especially the word 'Pavia'.

Now I was certain that Scudder never did anything without a
reason, and I was pretty sure that there was a cypher in all this.
That is a subject which has always interested me, and I did a bit at
it myself once as intelligence officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer
War. I have a head for things like chess and puzzles, and I used to
reckon myself pretty good at finding out cyphers. This one looked
like the numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to the
letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the clue
to that sort after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think Scudder
would have been content with anything so easy. So I fastened on the
printed words, for you can make a pretty good numerical cypher if you
have a key word which gives you the sequence of the letters.

I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell
asleep 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 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 the cushions.

'And that's a' I get,' he moaned. 'A heid hetter than hell
fire, and twae een lookin' different ways for the Sabbath.'

'What did it?' I asked.

'A drink they ca' brandy. Bein' a teetotaller I keepit off the
whisky, but I was nip-nippin' a' day at this brandy, and I doubt I'll
no be weel for a fortnicht.' His voice died away into a splutter,
and sleep once more laid its heavy hand on him.

My plan had been to get out at some station down the line, but
the train suddenly gave me a better chance, for it came to a
standstill at the end of a culvert which spanned a brawling
porter-coloured river. I looked out and saw that every carriage
window was closed and no human figure appeared in the landscape. So
I opened the door, and dropped quickly into the tangle of hazels
which edged the line.

it would have been all right but for that infernal dog. Under
the impression that I was decamping with its master's belongings, it
started to bark, and all but got me by the trousers. This woke up
the herd, who stood bawling at the carriage door in the belief that I
had committed suicide. I crawled through the thicket, reached the
edge of the stream, and in cover of the bushes put a hundred yards or
so behind me. Then from my shelter I peered back, and saw the guard
and several passengers gathered round the open carriage door and
staring in my direction. I could not have made a more public
departure if I had left with a bugler and a brass band.

Happily the drunken herd provided a diversion. He and his dog,
which was attached by a rope to his waist, suddenly cascaded out of
the carriage, landed on their heads on the track, and rolled some way
down the bank towards the water. In the rescue which followed the
dog bit somebody, for I could hear the sound of hard swearing.
Presently they had forgotten me, and when after a quarter of a mile's
crawl I ventured to look back, the train had started again and was
vanishing in the cutting.

I was in a wide semicircle of moorland, with the brown river as
radius, and the high hills forming the northern circumference. There
was not a sign or sound of a human being, only the plashing water and
the interminable crying of curlews. Yet, oddly enough, for the first
time I felt the terror of the hunted on me. It was not the police
that I thought of, but the other folk, who knew that I knew Scudder's
secret and dared not let me live. I was certain that they would
pursue me with a keenness and vigilance unknown to the British law,
and that once their grip closed on me I should find no mercy.

I looked back, but there was nothing in the landscape. The sun
glinted on the metals of the line and the wet stones in the stream,
and you could not have found a more peaceful sight in the world.
Nevertheless I started to run. Crouching low in the runnels of the
bog, I ran till the sweat blinded my eyes. The mood did not leave me
till I had reached the rim of mountain and flung myself panting on a
ridge high above the young waters of the brown river.

From my vantage-ground I could scan the whole moor right away to
the railway line and to the south of it where green fields took the
place of heather. I have eyes like a hawk, but I could see nothing
moving in the whole countryside. Then I looked east beyond the ridge
and saw a new kind of landscape - shallow green valleys with
plentiful fir plantations and the faint lines of dust which spoke of
highroads. Last of all I looked into the blue May sky, and there I
saw that which set my pulses racing ...

Low down in the south a monoplane was climbing into the heavens.
I was as certain as if I had been told that that aeroplane was
looking for me, and that it did not belong to the police. For an
hour or two I watched it from a pit of heather. It flew low along
the hill-tops, and then in narrow circles over the valley up which I
had come' Then it seemed to change its mind, rose to a great height,
and flew away back to the south.

I did not like this espionage from the air, and I began to think
less well of the countryside I had chosen for a refuge. These
heather hills were no sort of cover if my enemies were in the sky,
and I must find a different kind of sanctuary. I looked with more
satisfaction to the green country beyond the ridge, for there I
should find woods and stone houses.

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white
ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream.
As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a
plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary
house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and
leaning on the parapet was a young man.

He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with
spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger
marking the place. Slowly he repeated -

As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With winged
step, o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian. He
jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant
sunburnt boyish face.

'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for
the road.'

The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me
from the house.

'Is that place an inn?' I asked.

'At your service,' he said politely. 'I am the landlord, Sir,
and I hope you will stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have
had no company for a week.'

I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my
pipe. I began to detect an ally.

'You're young to be an innkeeper,' I said.

'My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live
there with my grandmother. It's a slow job for a young man, and it
wasn't my choice of profession.'

'Which was?'

He actually blushed. 'I want to write books,' he said.

'And what better chance could you ask?' I cried. 'Man, I've
often thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in
the world.'

'Not now,' he said eagerly. 'Maybe in the old days when you had
pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the
road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of fat
women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and
the shooting tenants in August. There is not much material to be got
out of that. I want to see life, to travel the world, and write
things like Kipling and Conrad. But the most I've done yet is to get
some verses printed in Chambers's Journal.' I looked at the inn
standing golden in the sunset against the brown hills.

'I've knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn't despise such
a hermitage. D'you think that adventure is found only in the tropics
or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you're rubbing shoulders with
it at this moment.'

'That's what Kipling says,' he said, his eyes brightening, and
he quoted some verse about 'Romance bringing up the 9.15'.

'Here's a true tale for you then,' I cried, 'and a month from
now you can make a novel out of it.'

Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a
lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the
minor details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from
Kimberley, who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up
a gang. They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best
friend, and were now on my tracks.

I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn't. I
pictured a flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the
crackling, parching days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I
described an attack on my life on the voyage home, and I made a
really horrid affair of the Portland Place murder. 'You're looking
for adventure,' I cried; 'well, you've found it here. The devils are
after me, and the police are after them. It's a race that I mean to
win.'

'By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is
all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.'

'You believe me,' I said gratefully.

'Of course I do,' and he held out his hand. 'I believe
everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the
normal.'

He was very young, but he was the man for my money.

'I think they're off my track for the moment, but I must lie
close for a couple of days. Can you take me in?'

He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the
house. 'You can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole.
I'll see that nobody blabs, either. And you'll give me some more
material about your adventures?'

As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an
engine. There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend, the
monoplane.

He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook
over the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was
stacked with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw
the grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called
Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all
hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He
had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily
paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I
told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange
figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and
aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder's
note-book.

He came back at midday with the Scotsman. There was nothing in
it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a
repetition of yesterday's statement that the murderer had gone North.
But there was a long article, reprinted from The Times, about
Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was
no mention of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for
the afternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search for the
cypher.

As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elaborate
system of experiments I had pretty well discovered what were the
nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word, and when I thought of
the odd million words he might have used I felt pretty hopeless. But
about three o'clock I had a sudden inspiration.

The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder had
said it was the key to the Karolides business, and it occurred to me
to try it on his cypher.

It worked. The five letters of 'Julia' gave me the position of
the vowels. A was J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so
represented by X in the cypher. E was XXI, and so on. 'Czechenyi'
gave me the numerals for the principal consonants. I scribbled that
scheme on a bit of paper and sat down to read Scudder's pages.

In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers
that drummed on the table.

I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming up
the glen towards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was the
sound of people alighting. There seemed to be two of them, men in
aquascutums and tweed caps.

Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes
bright with excitement.

'There's two chaps below looking for you,' he whispered.
'They're in the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked
about you and said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they
described you jolly well, down to your boots and shirt. I told them
you had been here last night and had gone off on a motor bicycle this
morning, and one of the chaps swore like a navvy.'

I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed
thin fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and
lisped in his talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my
young friend was positive.

I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they
were part of a letter -

... 'Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he
could not act for a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good
now, especially as Karolides is uncertain about his plans. But
if Mr T. advises I will do the best I ...' I manufactured it
rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page of a private
letter.

'Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask them
to return it to me if they overtake me.'

Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping
from behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was
slim, the other was sleek; that was the most I could make of my
reconnaissance.

The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. 'Your paper woke
them up,' he said gleefully. 'The dark fellow went as white as death
and cursed like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly.
They paid for their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn't wait
for change.'

'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 Chief Constable.
Describe the two men, and say you suspect them of having had
something to do with the London murder. 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
these were compared to this I was now engaged in! When he went to
bed I sat up and finished Scudder. I 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 opposite 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 the 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, and 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.