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