The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan Read Free Book Online Page A

had been deciphering in a back room of a country inn, overlooking
     a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my brain as I swung in the big
     touring-car from glen to glen.
    My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister, but a little reflection
     convinced me that that would be useless. Who would believe my tale? I must show a
     sign, some token in proof, and Heaven knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep
     going myself, ready to act when things got riper, and that was going to be no light
     job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me and the watchers of
     the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on my trail.
    I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by the sun, for I remembered
     from the map that if I went north I would come into a region of coalpits and industrial
     towns. Presently I was down from the moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of a
     river. For miles I ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of the trees I saw a
     great castle. I swung through little old thatched villages, and over peaceful lowland
     streams, and past gardens blazing with hawthorn and yellow laburnum. The land was
     so deep in peace that I could scarcely believe that somewhere behind me were those
     who sought my life; ay, and that in a month’s time, unless I had the almightiest of
     luck, these round country faces would be pinched and staring, and men would be lying
     dead in English fields.
    About midday I entered a long straggling village, and had a mind to stop and eat.
     Half-way down was the Post Office, and on the steps of it stood the postmistress and
     a policeman hard at work conning a telegram. When they saw me they wakened up, and
     the policeman advanced with raised hand, and cried on me to stop.
    I nearly was fool enough to obey. Then it flashed upon me that the wire had to do
     with me; that my friends at the inn had come to an understanding, and were united
     in desiring to see more of me, and that it had been easy enough for them to wire the
     description of me and the car to thirty villages through which I might pass. I released
     the brakes just in time. As it was, the policeman made a claw at the hood, and only
     dropped off when he got my left in his eye.
    I saw that main roads were no place for me, and turned into the byways. It wasn’t
     an easy job without a map, for there was the risk of getting on to a farm road and
     ending in a duck-pond or a stable-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