I kept too tight a hold. Any balance was impossible.
Either I had to investigate every cracking branch, every inexplicable sound, or none at all. And so it was that I didn’t pay attention until the final rush of feet.
I ascribe my safety to sheer animal panic, for I am no athlete. All my suppressed fears exploded instantaneously and I jumped sideways and off, like a hare out of her form. As my pursuers stumbled over the stones, I increased a lead of five yards to twenty. I led them towards the road and then dived–literally dived, headfirst–over a gap in the hedge which I knew was closed by five strands of barbed wire. They crashed into it as I picked myself up, and gave tongue loudly in oaths that certainly weren’t those of local men. There were two of them. One had a cultured accent, and a loud and hearty voice. The other was a foreigner. Their speed and energy made me certain that neither was the man I had seen at Blossom’s gate. Dense cloud was moving over the ground, and in that foggy darkness I could get no impression at all of height or build. It was a comforting thought that to them too I must have been nothing but a piece of night which moved.
By the time they got clear of the wire and were able to listen to anything but themselves, I was safe. I dropped to the ground and waited. One of them produced a torch that he hadn’t had time to use before, and flashed it halfheartedly around. I noticed that he held it away from him at the full stretch of his arm. It was obvious that he thought I might fire at the light. This was a cheering reminder that I was not dealing with police, and that my pursuers, whoever they were, expected a more formidable enemy than an innocent and hitherto respectable salesman.
They gave up the search for me and returned to the wall. There of course they found my spade and walked off with it. That was a disaster. There would be some wonderful sets of my fingerprints on that spade. The Englishman said to the other:
“Hold it by the blade, man!”
So that was that, and the end of me if ever they chose to go to the police. I could never produce any convincing story to explain what I was doing with a spade in that corner of the shoot.
They walked away diagonally across the fields, aiming– I had to gamble on it–for the cart track. As soon as I was sure, I ran straight to my bicycle, tore silently up the road and reached the junction a little before them. They had no waiting car. They turned left and walked along the stretch of road I had just covered, one of them carrying the spade over his shoulder and still holding it by the blade. I followed, trailing them by the sound of their footsteps.
When they got over the brow of the hill I decided to take a chance. The road was good and my cycle well oiled. It made no more noise than dead leaves blowing over the tarmac. They were talking together as I swept down behind them, and when they heard me it was too late. I passed them at about fifteen miles an hour, swerved, grabbed at the spade and wobbled twice across the road– but I had it, and the torch was flashed too late. I heard them begin to run, and I put on speed.
Further on I came to a motorcycle and sidecar, parked just off the road without lights. I don’t suppose anyone else would have noticed it, but I was looking for their transport, and I knew all the gates and gaps where it could be. I had about a couple of minutes to deal with it. I caught carburetor and petrol pipe a devastating swipe with the spade f wrenched off the clutch cable, and then saw a handy billet of wood with which I wrecked the spokes of the back wheel. I lost my temper with that motorcycle, and I left it looking as if I had. Then I rode peacefully back to Dorchester, recovered my car, and was home before midnight with a story that I hadn’t had to stay at Salisbury after all.
It is now time to say something of my silent Cecily. She seldom says what she thinks. On the other hand, unless she is talking to fools who expect it of her, she never says what she doesn’t think. This apparent quiescence–a reluctance, one might call it, to disturb the status quo–makes her very easy to live with; too easy, perhaps, for I am inclined to accept her longer silences without inquiring into the cause as closely as I ought.
Such masculine laziness was now useful. I could pretend I didn’t notice her mood. She, on her part, was much too proud to ask me the reason for my odd behavior two nights running. I don’t want to give the impression that I had to explain all my movements to her. Of course I didn’t. I was a hard-working quarry agent, frequently on the road at short notice. No, I mean that ours was as good a marriage as you could find. If I was anxious or excited, she always knew it; if it was she who went through some silent crisis, I usually knew it. But we were both quite capable of feigning to see nothing wrong until the cloud over the other, whatever it was, had passed.
This peace which she created in our home helped me through the next forty-eight hours. When Cecily found a report in Thursday’s evening paper of an abandoned motorcycle on the upper road, which had had its number plates removed and seemed to have been in a smash, I was able to grunt and answer, with complete lack of interest, that I suppose it was stolen. I wanted, of course, day and night, to go up to the shoot and see that the rabbits in their pit were undisturbed, but somehow I managed to control myself until the week end.
On Saturday I took a full day off, and went over the ground with a determined unconcern calculated to deceive any watcher. The knowledge that I might be in the field of somebody’s glasses made me concentrate very nervously on my shooting–with the odd result that I couldn’t miss.
I was careful not to go straight to the pit. When at last I did go there, in the normal course of walking the length of the down for a hare, the slope looked so natural that I wondered at my fears. Then I remembered that there were only nine inches of earth between me and discovery, and I thought of the cowardliness of my act and the cruelty of this lonely death. Yet it was certain that powerful friends knew of his death or disappearance, and would do whatever had to be done.
The stones from the wall were on the plowed field where I had left them. I don’t know what the next-door farmer, to whom this field belonged, made of them. Possibly he assumed that Blossom, with whom he was on very neutral terms, had needed some stones for walling and would clean up the mess in due season. Which of them owned this worthless little plot, with its trees and ruins and nettles, I never found out.
I sat down and ate my sandwiches at the top of the shoot, and as I let my eyes wander over the loved, familiar rise and fall of the land, I became aware that there was a question to be put to it. Those two men who nearly caught me– what were they doing in the northeast corner of the shoot? There was no reason why they should look for me at that end of the boundary hedge, and I was sure I hadn’t made enough noise to attract them. Then suppose that they were not looking for me at all–had given it up, and were on their way back to the road? On their way back from what?
I found enough of their tracks to prove that they had come from the west, along a cattle-proof hedge that divided Blossom’s down. Beyond it, the down ran on in a great expanse of close rabbit turf which had never been plowed. Close to the hedge were dense, rounded thickets of bramble that looked like the huts of a kaffir kraal. They repeated so exactly those domes and bastions where the dead man had been at work that I wondered if the same mysterious activity might not have been carried on.