There was little wind. The countryside was utterly silent except for the drop of the trees. I could see the lights in Patachon’s farm and smell the sweet wood smoke from his chimneys. I dropped down into the vale and made my way to the farm along the edge of the open road, coming to the back of the north wing across an orchard. Here there was a high wall with the sloping roof of a farm building above it. From the top of the gable I should have the yard and the whole front of the house under observation. I didn’t care to enter the yard itself. Even if the dogs neither heard nor saw me, the south-west wind, such as it was, would have carried my scent to them.

The wall was built of flints and easily climbed, but there was a gap of two feet between the top of the wall and the lower edge of the slates which gave me trouble. A rotten iron gutter ran below the slates, and it was difficult to reach the roof without momentarily putting some weight on this gutter. Eventually I got up by way of a stout iron bracket and the gable end.

I lay on the slates with my head over the coping. I could see right into the living-room of the farm—a peaceful and depressing sight. Quive-Smith was playing chess with Patachon’s small daughter. I was surprised to see him sitting so carelessly before a lighted window with the blind up, and all black Dorset outside; but then I understood that, as always, I had underrated him. The clever devil knew that he was safe with his head nearly touching that of the child across the board. He was teaching her the game. I saw him laugh and shake his head and show her some move she should have made.

It was a bitter shock to find him still there. The eleven days had seemed an eternity to me. To him they were just eleven days; it was even possible, I thought, that he had been enjoying himself. My disappointment turned to fury. It was the first time in the whole of this business that I lost my temper. I lay on the roof picking at the moss on the stone coping, and cursing Quive-Smith, his country, his party, and his boss in a white-hot silence. I blasted him to hell, him and his friends and Patachon and their manservants and maid-servants. If my thoughts had hit those walls, I should have created a massacre that would have done credit to a plunging Jehovah called from eternity by the anathemas of a thousand infuriated priests.

It shook me out of my melancholy, that blazing, silent orgasm of rage. I didn’t stop to think that I had brought all this on myself, nor to consider that if I had actually been transported to that living-room I should have shown a damned silly punctilious courtesy to the lot of them. I let myself go. I don’t remember anything like it since I enjoyed—certainly, enjoyed—speechless temper at the age of seven.

I was brought back to reality by a fit of shivering. I had sweated with wrath and the perspiration was cooling in the night air. It’s strange that I noticed it, for all my clothes were as permanently wet as those of a seaman in the days of sail. There must be a special virtue in sweat, cooling one spiritually as well as physically.

Quive-Smith might stay for weeks. I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the burrow. I determined to take to open country again. I am not persuading myself of that. I really meant to go on the run, desperate though my chances were. Considering my appearance, to live and move at all would have been a hundred times harder than my original escape. Then I was believed to be dead and nobody was looking for me; now the police would be on me at the first rumour of my presence. But I wasn’t going back. I intended to stalk around the downs, hiding in barns and in gorse, and living, if there were no other food, upon the raw meat of sheep. I could keep Quive-Smith under observation until such time as he returned to London or wherever else his undoubted ability to increase the rottenness in a rotten world should be required.

I watched the living-room until the child went to bed. Then the major joined Patachon in front of the fire, and Patachon’s wife entered with two huge china mugs of cider. All three settled down to newspapers. There was nothing more to be learned.

I sidled towards the gable end, the weight of my body taken on shoulder and thigh, left hand on the coping and right hand testing the slates ahead lest one should be loose. I was concerned, God help me, with the noise of a single slate sliding down the roof into the gutter! A few feet from the end there was a subsidence beneath me. The slates sagged. I seemed to be floating on a heavy liquid that moulded itself to me, suddenly became brittle and crashed to the floor of the barn. For an instant I swung from the coping and then that too gave way. Five feet of stone tile, a solid expanse of slate, and myself roared down on to a pile of iron drinking troughs. It sounded like the collapse of a foundry.

I found later that I had reopened the wound in my shoulder and suffered various cuts and bruises, but at the time I was only shaken. I picked myself up from that welter of ironwork and dashed to the open door of the barn. I didn’t go through it. Quive-Smith had thrown up the window of the living-room, and his long legs were already over the sill. My only thought was that he mustn’t know I was still in this part of the country. The dogs started barking and jumping against their chains. Patachon opened the front door and stumped over the threshold, flashlight in hand.

I retreated into the barn and dived under the drinking troughs. They were ranged side by side, so that there was room for me between any two, and covered by the slates and rubble from the roof. Quive-Smith and the farmer entered the barn immediately afterwards.

‘Damn ’un!’ stormed Patachon, observing the damage, ‘’tis that beggarin’ murderer after my cheeses. Over t’ barn and down to dairy! I knew ’e was a stealin’ of ’em. Over t’ barn and down to dairy!’

I don’t suppose he had lost an ounce, but farmers always suspect something is being stolen from them; there are so many things to steal. Quive-Smith obligingly agreed with me.

‘Oh, I don’t think there was anybody on the roof,’ he said. ‘Look at that!’

I knew what he was pointing at—a broken beam. It hadn’t even broken with a crack. It had just given way like a sponge of wood dust.

‘Death-watch beetle,’ said the major. ‘I met the same thing in the East Riding, by Jove! Tithe barn it was. Poor chap broke his bloody neck!’

It didn’t ring quite true, but it was a gallant attempt at the right manner.

‘Rotted!’ agreed Patachon in a disgusted tone. ‘Damn ’un, ’e’s rotted!’

‘Got to happen some time,’ answered Quive-Smith. ‘We ought to be thankful no one was hurt.’

‘Bin there three ’underd years,’ grumbled Patachon, ‘and ’e ’as to come beggarin’ down on our ’eads!’

‘Oh, well,’ the major said cheerfully. ‘I’ll turn to in the morning and give you a hand. Nothing to be done now! Nothing at all!’

I heard them leave the barn, straining my ears to analyse their two individual treads, making absolutely certain that one of them did not remain behind, or return. I heard the front door of the farm shut and bolted, and waited till the silence of the night was restored, till the faint noises of windows opening and bedroom doors closing had ceased, till the rats began to scutter over the floor of the barn. Then I crawled to the door and out, creeping like a nocturnal caterpillar along the angle between the wall and the filthy courtyard.

For what I then did I have no excuse. I had begun to think as an animal; I was afraid but a little proud of it. Instinct, saving instinct, had preserved me time and again. I accepted its power complacently, never warning myself that instinct might be deadly wrong. If it were not the hunted could always escape the hunter, and the carnivores would be extinct as the great saurians.

Gone was my disgust with my burrow; gone my determination to take to open country whatever the difficulties of food and shelter. I didn’t think, didn’t reason. I was no longer the man who had challenged and nearly beaten all the cunning and loyalty of a first-class power. Living as a beast, I had become as a beast, unable to question emotional stress, unable to distinguish danger in general from a particular source of danger. I could startle a dog fox, move as quietly and sleep as lightly, but the price I paid was to be deprived of ordinary human cunning.