I kept to the hill-tops, following the ridgeways southwards till they ended on Eggardon Down. There I was lost. There was not a star showing, and although I knew I was on Eggardon, I could not tell from what point of the compass I had immediately approached it; the tracks, ancient and modern, green and metalled, crossed and switched like the lines in a goods yard. At last I found myself in the outer ditch of the camp and, to make sure of my orientation, walked half-way round the huge circuit of earthworks until I could see far below me the faint lights of a town, which had to be Bridport.

The emptiness was infinity, darkness with distance but no shape. The south-west wind swirled over the turf, and the triple line of turf ramparts hung over me like smooth seas travelling through the night. I might have been upon the eastern slopes of the Andes with an empty continent of forest at my feet. I could have wished it so. There I should have felt alone, secure, an impregnable outpost of humanity.

Eggardon affected me as a city. The camp was haunted. I didn’t feel the presence of its builders, those unknown imperialists who set their cantonments on the high chalk, but I was suddenly terrified of the sleeping towns and villages that lay at my feet and clustered, waiting, around empty Eggardon. A grey mare and her foal leaped monstrously out of a ditch and galloped away. A thorn-bush just beyond the easy range of sight hovered between reality and a vision; it was round and black like the mouth of a tunnel. Guilt was on me. I had killed without object, and my fellows were all around me waiting lest I should kill again.

I stumbled down to the valley, compelling myself to move slowly and to look straight ahead. If there had been any living being upon Eggardon I should have walked into him. I was obsessed by this sense of all southern England crowding in upon the hill.

As I dodged and darted home from lane to lane and farmhouse to farmhouse, I couldn’t get the side-car out of my head. I wanted to know if it had been disturbed. Should the police have found it, and taken it from the stream for identification, they might disbelieve the evidence of the cottages—which was good only as long as no one questioned it—and search the country where I really was.

Although it was only a field away from a well-frequented by-road, the side-car was in a safe place: a muddy little stream flowing between deep banks with the hawthorn arching overhead. It would remain unseen, I thought, for years unless some yokel took it into his head to wade up the bed of the stream or a cow rubbed her way through the bushes.

I entered the water at a cattle-wallow, plunging up to my knees in mire, and forced my way under the hawthorn. I couldn’t see the side-car. I was sure of the place, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t allow myself to worry yet, but I felt, as a stab of pain, the cold of the water. I pushed on downstream, hoping that the side-car had been shifted by the force of the current, and knowing very well, as I now remember, that nothing but a winter flood would shift it.

At last I saw it, a faint white bulk in the darkness canted up against a bank of rushes where the stream widened. I was so glad to find it that I didn’t hesitate, didn’t listen to the intuition that was clamouring to be heard, and being ascribed to nervousness. After Eggardon I was not allowing any imagination any play.

I was leaning over the side-car when a voice quite softly called my name. I straightened up, so astounded and fascinated that for a second I couldn’t move. A thin beam of light flashed on my face, and dropped to my heart with a roar and a smashing blow. I was knocked backwards across the baby carriage, pitching with my right side on the mud and my head half under water. I have no memory of falling, only of the light and the simultaneous explosion. I must have been unconscious while I hit the mud, for just so long, I suppose, as my heart took to recover its habit of beating.

I remained collapsed, with eyes staring, trying to pick up the continuity of life. If I had had the energy I should have cackled with crazy laughter; it seemed so very extraordinary to have a beam of light thrust through one’s heart and be still alive. I heard my assassin give his ridiculous party war-cry in a low, fervent voice, as if praising God for the slaughter of the infidel. Then a car cruised quietly up the road, and I heard a door slam as someone got out. I lay still, uncertain whether the gunman had gone to meet the newcomer or not; he had, for I heard their voices a moment later as they approached the stream, presumably to collect my body. I crawled off through the grass and rushes on the far bank, and bolted for home. I am not ashamed to remember that I was frightened, shocked, careless. To be shot from ambush is horribly unnerving.

I jumped into my tree and down into the lane, regardless of darting pain whenever I moved my right arm. Then I shut the door of the den behind me and lay down to collect myself. When I had regained a more graceful mastery of my spirit, I lit a candle and explored the damage.

The bullet—from a .45 revolver—had turned on the nickel of the flask in my breast-pocket, ploughed sideways through my leather jacket and come to rest (point foremost, thank God!) in the fleshy part of my right shoulder. It was so near the surface that I squeezed it out with my fingers. The skin was bruised and broken right across my chest, and I felt as if I had been knocked down by a railway engine; but no serious damage had been done.

I understood why the hunter had not even taken the trouble to examine his kill. He had shot along the beam of a flash-lamp, seen the bullet strike and watched the stain of whisky, which couldn’t in artificial light be distinguished from blood, leap to the breast of my coat and spread. It wasn’t necessary to pay me any further attention for the moment; he had no use for my pelt or liver.

I patched myself up and lit a pipe, thinking of the fellow who had shot me. He had used a revolver because a rifle couldn’t be handled in such thick cover and at so close a range, but his technique showed that he had experience of big-game. He had got into my mind. He knew that sooner or later I should have a look at that side-car. And his gentle calling of my name to make me turn my head was perfect.

They had despatched a redoubtable emissary. He knew, as the police did not, who I was and what sort of man I was; thus he had been suspicious of my elaborate false trails. He guessed the plain facts: that I had committed a folly in going to Lyme Regis, and that my jack-in-the-box tricks thereafter were evidence of nothing but my anxiety. Therefore I had some secure hiding-place not far from Lyme Regis and almost certainly on the Beaminster side of it. His private search for the side-car, which he may have been carrying on for weeks, was then concentrated on the right spot. That he found it was due to imagination rather than luck. It had to be near a track or lane; it was probably in wood or water. And I think if I had been he I should have voted for water. There was a pattern in my escape. I had a preference for hiding, travelling, throwing off pursuit by water. Water, as the Spanish would say, was my querencia.

Well, he had missed. I think I wrote in some other context which I have forgotten that the Almighty looks after the rogue male. Nevertheless this sportsman (I allow him the title, for he must have waited up two or three nights over his bait, and been prepared to wait for many more) would be content. He had discovered the bit of country where I had been hiding, and he could even be pretty sure whereabouts my lair was. My panic-stricken dash through the water-meadow showed that I was bolting south. I wouldn’t be camping in the marshland; therefore the only place for me was on or just over the semicircle of low hills beyond. All that he had to do was to go into the long grass, as it were, after his wounded beast. The hunt had narrowed from all England to Dorset, from Dorset to the western corner of the county, and from that to four square miles.