In half an hour they were back at Patachon’s. One of the men got out and went indoors. The other drove the car away. Someone, then, had come to stay at the farm. I remained on watch in the tree, for I didn’t like the look of things.
In the evening Patachon and his visitor emerged from the farmhouse with their guns under their arms, prepared for a stroll round the estate. They started towards the low-lying thickets at the western end of the farm, and I didn’t see them again for an hour. Patachon owned a lot of rough land in that direction which I had never bothered to explore. I heard a few shots. A flight of three duck shot northwards and vanished in the dusk. A wood-pigeon came homing to my tree, saw me, banked against the wind and dived side-ways with brilliant virtuosity. When I caught sight of the two guns again, they were stealing along the edge of the lane, separated from me only by the width of the two hedges. Patachon’s visitor was Major Quive-Smith.
The farmer picked up a stone and flung it smack into the tree, just missing my feet. No pigeon flew out of the ivy, needless to say.
‘And if ’e’d a bin there,’ said Patachon bitterly, ‘ ’e’d a flewed t’other way.’
‘He would,’ agreed Major Quive-Smith. ‘By Jove! I can’t think why that fellow wouldn’t let his little bit of shooting!’
That explained why he had gone to see Pat. And Pat, I am sure, refused his request rudely and finally.
‘Sour man, ’e is!’ said the farmer. ‘Sour!’
‘Does he shoot at all himself?’
‘No. ’E baint a man for fun. But don’t ’ee go botherin’ ’im, Major, for there’s nobbut in the ’edge this year.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Quive-Smith.
I could see the swift, suspicious turn of his head, and hear the bark in the question.
‘A perishin’ cat! Can’t trap ’un. Can’t shoot ’un.’
‘Very shy of man, I suppose?’
‘Knows as well as we what us would do to ’un if us could catch ’un,’ Patachon agreed.
They strolled down to the farm for supper. I observed that the major carried one of those awkward German weapons with a rifled barrel below the two gun barrels. As a rifle, it is inaccurate at 200 yards; as a gun, unnecessarily heavy. But the three barrels were admirably adapted to his purpose of ostensibly shooting rabbits while actually expecting bigger game.
I don’t yet know Quive-Smith’s true nationality or name. As a retired military man he had nearly, but not quite, convinced Saul. In his present part, a nondescript gentleman amusing himself with a farm holiday and some cheap and worthless shooting, there was no fault to be found. Tall, fair, slim, and a clever actor, he could pass as a member of half a dozen different nations according to the way he cut his hair and moustache. His cheekbones are too high to be typically English, but so are my own. His nose is that unmistakable Anglo-Roman which with few exceptions—again I am one of them—seems to lead its possessor to Sandhurst. He might have been a Hungarian or Swede, and I have seen faces and figures like his among fair-haired Arabs. I think he is not of pure European origin; his hands, feet, and bone structure are too delicate.
To rent the shooting over three-quarters of the country where I was likely to be was a superb conception. He had every right to walk about with a gun and to fire it. If he bagged me, the chances were a thousand to one against the murder ever being discovered. In a year or two Saul would have to assume that I was dead. But where had I died? Anywhere between Poland and Lyme Regis. And where was my body? At the bottom of the sea or in a pit of quick-lime if Quive-Smith and his unknown friend with the car knew their business.
I was glad of my two unconscious protectors: Asmodeus, whose presence in the lane made my own rather improbable, and Pat who wouldn’t have trespassers on his land and wouldn’t let his little bit of shooting. I know that type of dyspeptic John Bull. When he has forbidden a person to enter his ground, he is ready to desert the most urgent jobs merely to watch his boundary fence. Quive-Smith couldn’t be prevented from exploring Pat’s side of the hedge, but he would have to do it with discretion and preferably at night.
I returned to my burrow, now no larger than it had been in the first few weeks, and much damper. I cursed myself for not having widened the chimney before I cleaned up the lane; I could then have thrown out the earth and allowed the rain to distribute it. The inner chamber was uninhabitable and so remains.
I stayed in my sleep-bag for two wretched days. I envied Quive-Smith. He was showing great courage in hunting single-handed a fugitive whom he believed to be desperate. Twice Asmodeus came home with a rush through the ventilation hole and crouched at the back of the den, untouchable and malignant—a sure sign that somebody was in the lane. I lay still underground. Desperate I was, and am, but I want no violence.
On the third afternoon I found the immobility and dirt no longer endurable, and decided to reconnoitre. Asmodeus was out, so I knew that there was no human being in the immediate vicinity. I hoped that Quive-Smith was already paying attention to some other part of the county, or at least to some other farm, but I warned myself not to underestimate his patience. I poked my filthy head and shoulders out into the heart of the blackberry bush and remained there, listening. It was a long and intricate process to leave the bush; I had to lie flat on the ground, separating the trailing stems with gloved hands and pushing myself forwards with my toes.
I sat among my green fortifications, enjoying the open air and watching Pat’s field and the sheep down beyond. It wasn’t much to have under observation. Behind me was my own lane, and fifty yards to my left the cross hedge in which was another lane running up to the down; there might have been a platoon of infantry in both, for all that I could have seen of them or they of me. Opposite me was another hedge that separated Pat’s pasture from Patachon’s sheep; to my right, the skyline of the pasture.
About five o’clock Pat came into the field to drive the cows home himself—a task that hitherto he had always left to a boy—and remained for some time staring about him truculently and swinging a stick. At sunset Major Quive-Smith detached himself from a brown-scarred rabbit warren on the hillside, and put his field-glasses back in their case. I had not the remotest notion that he was there, but, since I had been assuming he was everywhere, I knew he had not seen me. To let me see him I thought obliging.
He struck down the hillside into the lane leading to Patachon’s farm. As soon as he was in dead ground I crawled to the corner to have a look at him while he passed beneath me. A clump of gorse covered me from observation from the pasture as I crouched in the angle of the hedges.
I waited but he didn’t come. Then it occurred to me that he must hate those deep tracks almost as much as I did; a man walking along them was completely at the mercy of anyone above him. So he was possibly behind the opposite hedge, working his way back to the farm across the fields. It seemed odd that he should take all that trouble when he could have gone home by the vale and run no risks whatever; it seemed so odd that I suddenly realized I had been out-manoeuvred. He had shown himself deliberately. If I were haunting the lane, which he suspected, and out for revenge, of which he must have been sure, then I should have waited for him just in that corner where I was.
I turned round and peered through the gorse. He was racing silently down the slope towards me. He had decoyed me into the corner of two hedges, from which there was no escape.
He hadn’t seen me. He didn’t know I was there; he could only hope I was there. I tried a desperate bluff.
‘Git off my land!’ I yelled. ‘Git off ut, I tell ’ee, or I’ll ’ave the law on ’ee!’