O’Hara climbed the fifty-foot banking and walked along the outer walls of the fort. From the top of these Cyclopean battlements he looked abroad over miles of rolling country. Below him was a bell-barrow, to his right the deep, dark ditches of the inner defences. Ahead of him, miles away, he could see the surrounding hills, and, between and among them, the little winding roads, like strings of dirty tape, along one of which he thought his Cousin Gascoigne must be running. But although he gazed long and carefully, he could still see no sign of his cousin, and, glancing once more towards the inner earthworks of the castle, it occurred to him how strange it was that, on a fair afternoon, the fort should remain so gloomy. So unpleasantly persistent did this thought become (as did the one which followed it of how lonely the situation was) that he was obliged, in self-defence, to project his mind very strongly on to the object of his search, the valiant hare, who seemed to have disappeared (another uncomfortable thought from which he soon recoiled) without leaving a clue to guide the pursuers.
‘Hang it!’ thought O’Hara, forcing himself to return to the circumstances of logic. ‘He must have cut off towards the golf course and gone to Horston! Why didn’t I think of that before! I shouldn’t spot him from here!’
He had a last look for the hounds, and picked them out away to the east. Only a hawk-eyed person would have seen them at all, and only one who knew what to look for would have recognized them for what they were, for they were almost blurred by distance into forming part of the landscape. The sight of them put an end to his morbid fancies, and, not too well satisfied (for, although he had now worked out another route which the solitary hare might have taken, he had no proof that Gascoigne was really, after all, on the Horston road), O’Hara turned in his tracks, reached the ancient entrance to the fort between monumental bastions of earth (now well grassed on top of the chalk), and descended to a stony little path which circumscribed the hill-fort instead of mounting it. He struck off to the south, then bore eastward. Suddenly he obtained a glimpse of a runner in white making for a gap in the hills, and not more than three hundred yards ahead.
‘Wonder what’s happened?’ thought O’Hara. ‘Gerry ought to be further on than that! However, it looks as though I’ve got him!’
The track, having dropped from the hundred-foot contour to something nearer sea-level, degenerated into a ditch. O’Hara, running too confidently, turned his ankle on loose pebbles, but still limped on until he reached a secondary road, which broke out of the ditch and went alongside a small, shallow brook.
His ankle hurt sharply at first, but gradually settled to a dull pain which, without being unbearable, considerably slowed him up. In spite of this, he still had hopes of catching up with the hare.
‘He’ll go wrong after Horston,’ he thought. ‘He’ll take the wrong way across the golf course. I’ll get up to him, or, anyway, head him off, somewhere this side of Little Welsea. It’ll be a close call, but I know it round there and he doesn’t.’
The road beneath his feet grew firmer, the pain in his ankle slightly less. He would have liked to sit down on the grassy verge and rub his foot, but he did not want to lose time, and he felt, too, that so long as he kept on the move, the ankle would stand no chance of stiffening.
His pace was not more than a jog-trot, and he was limping along until he could see where the sandy road terminated, when he met a man in a car. The road they were in was so narrow that the car pulled up and O’Hara dropped into a walk. The man in the car leaned out. He was a middle-aged, shrewd-eyed fellow with a brisk voice.
‘Like a lift?’ he asked. ‘I see you’re limping a bit.’
‘It’s nothing,’ O’Hara replied. ‘Thanks, all the same, but I think I can manage all right. There’s plenty of grass alongside the main road ahead. Perhaps I’ll be better on that.’
‘I see,’ said the man. ‘What is it—a cross-country run?’
‘More or less. Hare and hounds. We don’t use scent, that’s all.’
‘Is the hare a tall fellow with fair hair?’
‘Yes,’ said O’Hara, beginning to feel impatient, and prevented by his native courtesy from showing it.
‘Take the footpath immediately opposite when you get on to the main road, then. That’s the way he took. I saw him turn off. I’m afraid you won’t catch him, all the same. He was going very strongly when I passed him.’
‘I thought he’d make for the golf course,’ said O’Hara, who could not see why his cousin should have taken the way the man said.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure, about that, but this fellow was taking the footpath I’m telling you of. I stopped to see him go by, and waited about a quarter of an hour to see whether there were any more behind him, but no more turned up, so on I came. You’re a bit late, aren’t you?’
‘Better late than never,’ said O’Hara.
The man eyed him doubtfully.
‘
‘I don’t think so,’ O’Hara replied. ‘But I’d better get on if I’m to catch him. Thanks very much for the tip!’
He broke into a lumbering trot, annoyed to find that his ankle had stiffened after all. When he reached the main road and glanced back he could still see the car. The man was standing in the road gazing after him, interested, no doubt, to see whether his advice would be followed.
Strong in this innocent assumption, O’Hara soon came in sight of the railway, and, following the footpath, crossed the main line by a footbridge. If the hare had passed that way, there was no other track he could have taken, but O’Hara, feeling dubiously that he had been sent on a wild-goose chase, found himself in another sandy lane. Two hundred yards along it he entered a wood, or, rather, not a natural wood but a plantation. It was gloomy, and, to his Celtic imagination, slightly frightening. Although the trees were young the atmosphere was heavy with a kind of mental thunder, as though ancient wrong had been done there and the land remembered it.
It was difficult to combat the suggestion of evil, and O’Hara, much oppressed by this, lengthened his stride and so quickened his pace that soon he was through the plantation and almost up to the house to which it belonged.
The detour he had made had added five miles already to the distance roughly estimated by the runners. An hour of precious time had gone, and the light was waning. O’Hara was now in a part of the country he did not know at all thoroughly, and this he found disconcerting, for, before embarking upon this ambitious heading-off of the hare, he had had, as he imagined, the landscape mapped out in his mind.
‘I wonder what place this is?’ he thought. ‘And how far Gerry really has led us up the garden? I think that fellow must have been wrong. Still, I’m in for it now. I can’t go back all that way. All the same, I wish I’d had another look at the map. This house… what a beastly place! And yet… what’s wrong with it?’
He slowed to look at it. The house stared back at him so oddly, sulkily and uncomfortably that he stopped, as though to meet a challenge. Then, with some idea of asking his way— for it seemed foolish to feel frightened by a house—he began to limp up to the gates.
These were wide open. There was no lodge, and yet this seemed to be the main entrance. A broad but weed-grown drive led straight as an arrow to the front door, which was like the door of a church except that it had an incongruous nineteenth-century porch to shield it from the weather. A stained and almost indecipherable notice just inside the gateway, and attached to a lichened post, said, with enviable curtness :
KEEP OUT.
Nothing was further from O’Hara’s thoughts by this time than to go in, and he remained gazing, in the fascination of horror, at the house. It was eerily still, and he thought at first that it might be uninhabited, for the blank and staring windows seemed to be without curtains and the place had a deserted, ghostly look, as though no human being ever went near it. It led, O’Hara fancied, a life of its own, apart from human life and antagonistic to it. It was not at this house that he would ask to be directed on his way.
Just as he was thinking thus, an old man, wheeling a barrow, came round the side of the house and, in doing so, broke the spell. O’Hara grinned to himself in contempt of his own foolish thoughts, and entered the grounds. At sight of him, however, the old man dropped the handles of the barrow, waved him off, and then scuttled into some bushes at the side of the building, rather in the manner of a surprised hen taking cover from a boisterous puppy.
‘Well; I’m damned!’ said O’Hara aloud; and turned back towards the road.
The blue mist was dimming the woods, and he thought, as he ran, of the hotel to which he was going; of the pleasures of a bath and a change of clothes—for the team had sent baggage on ahead of them and some were staying the night and would remain over Sunday in the seaside town, spending the morning swimming and the afternoon perhaps sailing on the bay. He groaned, half-humorously, and tried to quicken his pace.
