The Thirty-Nine Steps

small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated— “As when a Gryphon through the wilderness

With winged step, o’er hill and moory dale

Pursues the Arimaspian.”

       He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face.

       “Good-evening to you,” he said gravely. “It’s a fine night for the road.”

       The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house.

       “Is that place an inn?” I asked.

       “At your service,” he said politely. “I am the landlord, sir, and I hope you will stay the night, for to tell you the truth I have had no company for a week.”

       I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my pipe. I began to detect an ally.

       “You’re young to be an innkeeper,” I said.

       “My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there with my grandmother. It’s a slow job for a young man, and it wasn’t my choice of profession.”

       “Which was?”

       He actually blushed. “I want to write books,” he said.

       “And what better chance could you ask?” I cried. “Man, I’ve often thought that an innkeeper should make the best story-teller in the world.”

       “Not now,” he said eagerly. “Maybe in the old days when you had pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road. But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of fat women, who stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the shooting tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that. I want to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling and Conrad. But the most I’ve done yet is to get some verses printed in Chambers’s Journal.”

       I looked at the inn standing golden in the sunset against the brown hills.

       “I’ve knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn’t despise such a hermitage. D’you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you’re rubbing shoulders with it at this moment.”

       “That’s what Kipling says,” he said, his eyes brightening, and he quoted some verse about “Romance brings up the 9.15.”

       “Here’s a true tale for you then,” I cried, “and a month from now you can make a novel out of it.”

       Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley, who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang. They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and were now on my tracks.

       I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn’t. I pictured a flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the Portland Place murder. “You’re looking for adventure,” I cried, “well, you’ve found it here. The devils are after me, and the police are after them. It’s a race that I mean to win.”

       “By God!” he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, “it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.”

       “You believe me,” I said gratefully.

       “Of course I do,” and he held out his hand. “I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”

       He was very young, but he was the man for my money.

       “I think they’re off my track for the moment, but I must lie close for a couple of days. Can you take me in?”

       He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the house. “You can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I’ll see that nobody blabs, either. And you’ll give me some more material about your adventures?”

       As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an engine. There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend, the monoplane.

He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook over the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was stacked with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw the grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at all hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him. He had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder’s notebook.

       He came back at midday with the Scotsman. There was nothing in it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a repetition of yesterday’s statement that the murderer had gone North. But there was a long article, reprinted from the Times, about Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no mention of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the afternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search after the cipher.

       As I told you, it was a numerical cipher, and by an elaborate system of experiments I had pretty well discovered what were the nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word, and when I thought of the odd million words he might have used I felt pretty hopeless. But about three o’clock I had a sudden inspiration.

       The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder had said it was the key to the Karolides business, and it occurred to me to try it on his cipher.

       It worked. The five letters of “Julia” gave me the position of the vowels. A was J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so represented by X in the cipher. E was U=XXI, and so on. “Czechenyi” gave me the numerals for