yard, and I couldn't afford that kind of delay. I began to see what
an ass I had been to steal the car. The big green brute would be the
safest kind of clue to me over the breadth of Scotland. If I left it
and took to my feet, it would be discovered in an hour or two and
I would get no start in the race.

The immediate thing to do was to get to the loneliest roads.
These I soon found when I struck up a tributary of the big river,
and got into a glen with steep hills all about me, and a corkscrew
road at the end which climbed over a pass. Here I met nobody, but
it was taking me too far north, so I slewed east along a bad track
and finally struck a big double-line railway. Away below me I saw
another broadish valley, and it occurred to me that if I crossed it I
might find some remote inn to pass the night. The evening was now
drawing in, and I was furiously hungry, for I had eaten nothing since
breakfast except a couple of buns I had bought from a baker's cart.
just then I heard a noise in the sky, and lo and behold there was
that infernal aeroplane, flying low, about a dozen miles to the south
and rapidly coming towards me.

I had the sense to remember that on a bare moor I was at the
aeroplane's mercy, and that my only chance was to get to the leafy
cover of the valley. Down the hill I went like blue lightning,
screwing my head round, whenever I dared, to watch that damned
flying machine. Soon I was on a road between hedges, and dipping
to the deep-cut glen of a stream. Then came a bit of thick wood
where I slackened speed.

Suddenly on my left I heard the hoot of another car, and realized
to my horror that I was almost up on a couple of gate-posts through