So long as he saw me, I did not care where he saw me from. I hoped that all this preparation of the tree would not puzzle him. He looked the sort of person who would recognize a badger sett —he could take it for a fox’s earth if he liked — and would realize that I meant to watch whatever was there from the alder after sunset. It was wildly improbable that he would suspect the truth; that the alder was futile for observation and that I had chosen it because I could be stalked with such ease up the blind side of the fortress.
At last I walked away downstream, leaving him to examine at leisure what I had been up to. When I was out of his sight I broke into a trot, for I had only half an hour to reach the rendezvous with Ian, whose help was essential.
I reached the bridge in time and was just about to go down to the willow snag and clear away the tail of dead water weed undulating in the slow current when I saw old Isaac Purvis leisurely scything the young nettles on the green verge of the road. His bicycle leaned against the hedge —a marvel how the old boy could cycle for miles with the scythe wrapped in sacking over his shoulder — and he appeared to have started on a job which the Rural District Council could well have left till July.
He leaned on his scythe when he saw me hesitate at the bridge, his whole attitude an invitation to join him and talk.
“Nettles are coming on fast this year, Mr. Purvis,” I remarked.
“Grass is what I were cutting,” the old man answered, “a goodish step back, t’other side of the bridge.”
He waited with mischievous eyes to be asked why he had moved. So I did ask.
“You go on up the road, Purvis, says Colonel Parrow, and if you sees the perfesser you give ‘im this ‘ere!”
He slid into my hand a sheet torn from a notebook as neatly as if he were passing a betting slip under the eye of a policeman.
I have a feeling you may want to see me today. I shall he at the bridge about half past four. There’s another report of the stranger whom Ferrin mentioned to you, and I am trying to account for him.
“Very kind of you, Mr. Purvis,” I said.
“It was them Boers what started it,” he remarked obscurely. “Never ‘eard of ‘em again we wouldn’t, if ‘tweren’t for the Kaiser and ‘Itler.”
I had to trunk that one out. There was a sort of mad logic in it, for British insolence and weakness in the Boer War — or so I believe myself — were both partly responsible for 1914.
“You fought in South Africa?” I asked.
“Ah. Yeomanry. And me bowels never been the same since.”
I agreed that the campaign must have been frightening.
“Went down with enteric, I did, like all me troop. And I’ll tell you what cured me though you won’t ‘ardly believe it. I was ridin’ along scarcely ‘oldin’ on me ‘orse when one of them bloody Boers ups and shoots me through the guts. And when I gets to ‘ospital I ‘ear the doctor say: Well, we ain’t got to bother about perforation now, ‘e says, because ‘e’s perforated. I didn’t rightly know what ‘e meant, but I says hallelujah for me luck and I gets well. So when Colonel says to me: It’s a question of atomy, Purvis, I says: Well, they won’t get un, Colonel, not them Boers nor the Americans neither.”
It looked as if Ian had thought that a zoologist was insufficiently melodramatic for his village. If atomy was what I supposed — it seemed an excellent word — I was evidently a professor with some unspecified interest in nuclear fission.
“What did you think of this big, dark man who wanted to know which was the Nash road?” I asked as soon as I could get a word in.
“A pleasant-spoken gentleman,” said Isaac Purvis, as if that was about as far as he could safely go. “Put me in mind of old Worrall, ‘e did.”
“How do you mean exactly?”
“Old Worrall who ‘ad the farm opposite where you’re a-staying. I used to work for ‘im as carter thirty year ago, and I can see ‘im as plain as I sees you. Just as pleasant as ever, ‘e was, after ‘is eldest son ‘ad been took to the mad’ouse, and you’d ‘ave reckoned ‘e thought nothing of it. But one day ‘e says to me: God Almighty is goin’ to pay me for that, Isaac.”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing. What was there to ‘appen? ‘Is eyes were what I meant. Like a widder’s eyes when the parson tells ‘er that sufferin’ is good for ‘er.”
That vivid phrase brought back my unreasonable sense of guilt, which had been dispersed by fear and anger. Poor devil — if he believed I was the same sort of creature as Sporn and Dickfuss, he had a right to kill me. How long is it since revenge was considered a virtue in a man of honor? A mere three hundred years?
I asked Purvis if he had any reason to think that the big, dark man was a foreigner.
“Well, all I’ve seen of ‘im was three days back. I tells ’im what ‘e wants to know. And then I asks ‘im if ‘e weren’t the new undertaker what Mrs. Bunn wishes to make ‘er own bargain with. ‘E just says that ‘e weren’t.
“I knew as ‘e weren’t. ‘E was just out for a walk in a manner of speakin’. But I says to myself afterwards, I says, now if ‘e was the kind of gentleman what ain’t in a ‘urry and goes walkin’ when ‘e could do it easier in ‘is motor car, then ‘e’d like to ‘ear about Mrs. Bunn making ‘er own arrangements with the undertaker. So I wouldn’t say ‘e ain’t a foreigner and I wouldn’t say as ‘e is.
Mr. Purvis was willing to discuss till five o’clock the character of Englishmen — by which he meant the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. That was perhaps a long time to stand chatting in the open when I did not know where our gentleman had gone, but I did not wish to offend so useful an assistant by cutting him short.
At half past four Ian arrived. We drove off in his car. He seemed a little cold and military because he could not find a certain Jim Melton for whom he had been looking. The only time you could be sure of seeing the blasted man, I gathered, was when he was going into the magistrates’ court to pay a fine for some minor offense or coming out again; and then if you didn’t catch him on the court steps he vanished. An enviable gift, I thought.
Ian wanted me to go with him to Buckingham and have a leisurely dinner somewhere afterwards. When I told him to park the car by the roadside and settle down with me under a convenient haystack, he said he could not see why I found boy-scouting necessary. It was an effort to remember that he knew nothing of the last agitated twenty hours.
I gave him my story from the time I had left the Haunch of Mutton the night before. He did not interrupt. He was always a patient and practiced listener, though one never knew what explosion there might be at the end.
“But you’d got him cold!” he exclaimed. “Why on earth didn’t you hold him up in his bunker or on the road?”
I reminded him that I dared not shoot. There was no evidence to connect this harmless stroller in the brown tweed suit with the dog or with any attempt on me. I might have a fearful time clearing myself if I killed him. And one of us would almost certainly be killed. The fellow was capable of being just as dangerous as any wounded tiger. Even if I could drill him through the shoulder or shoot his gun out of his hand — and I was too long out of practice to be sure of either —my .22 wouldn’t stop him.
“You must have full police protection at once,” Ian insisted. “Don’t you care whether you’re alive or not?”
“Very much. I have a lot of work still to do on the red squirrel.”