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.