The Dancing Druids

into the village street. There they could be guarded (at the point of the revolver if necessary) until transport could be arranged for them to Cuchester, where the whole matter must be left to the police.

‘And I only hope we haven’t committed a felony,’ said Denis, grinning. ‘Now, who’s doing the haulage work, and who’s covering our retreat?’

‘Gerry is probably the best shot,’ said O’Hara, ‘unless it’s you, Bradley?’

‘Lord, no. Come on, then, George,’ said Denis. ‘O’Hara, you fight a rearguard action, if necessary, with the other gun.’

‘Queer they hadn’t the guns in their hands when they came down after us,’ said Gascoigne. ‘I suppose they thought we’d run straight into the party from the motor boat, and they might hit one of their own side if they fired.’

It was dawn by the time they reached the pull-in yard with the packing-cases, and at sight of the empty lorry Denis suggested that they might as well load the packing-cases on to it and drive them into Cuchester straight away.

‘The lorry must have brought them here,’ he argued, ‘so I don’t see why it shouldn’t take them back.’ This simple solution pleased everybody, and was about to be put into effect when into the yard ran three men.

‘Hello! Re’enter the spivs!’ said O’Hara. Gascoigne also recognized the newcomers, and, taking the gun in his hand, he waved it in ironic greeting. The spivs betrayed no surprise and no resentment.

‘Hey! Going towards London?’ yelled the foremost. ‘Give us a lift, will you, boys?’

‘Cuchester!’ shouted Denis. George let in his clutch, and the lorry moved slowly forward towards the entrance.

‘That’ll do fine!’ yelled the second of the men, moving out of the way as the lorry came out at the opening. The three men then hung on and tried to climb on to the tailboard, but Denis delicately stamped on the fingers of one, a Rugger shove in the chest from the large-palmed O’Hara settled the fate of the second, and a smack across the eyes from Gascoigne foiled the venturous tactics of the third. The last the lorry pirates saw of the wasp-waisted visitors was one on his back in the dust, another dabbing his nose with a bright silk handkerchief and the stamped- on one shaking be-ringed fists with histrionic gestures of hate and fury at the tailboard from which he had been dislodged.

‘I shouldn’t have told them Cuchester,’ said Denis. ‘I don’t think they have any connection whatever with the other lot, but we’ve annoyed them now, and they’ll give away our destination to anybody who happens to ask for it.’

The road from Slepe Rock to Cuchester was winding, hilly and lonely, and it was among what seemed the first created countryside that George left the road he was following and turned off down a lane which looked as though it ended in a river. Just before it reached the water, however, an ancient cattle-road, deep with hoof-marks and oleaginous with mire, turned off round the flank of a hill, and in this surprising spot the lorry drew up.

‘How come, George?’ enquired Denis, who, after the contest with the spivs, had seated himself beside the driver whilst the Irishmen, nursing their guns, lay bumpily asprawl among the cargo. ‘This ain’t the way to Cuchester!’

‘No, sir,’ George replied, unearthing and unfolding a map. ‘But to the best of my knowledge and belief, my tank’s nearly dry, and it’s better to remain in hiding than to break down in a lonely spot on a motor-road. Those fellows won’t let us get away with these packing-cases without a struggle, and, with your permission, I’m going back to the road to see their car go by. Then I can foot-slog it after them into Cuchester and bring out the police to this lorry.’

‘And, from all points of view, not at all a bad scheme,’ said Denis. ‘You mean that even if we’d had the petrol we’d hardly have outdistanced them to Cuchester?’

‘Well, it’s hard to determine that, sir, but the decision— mercifully, perhaps, as you suggest—is out of our hands. I will return and let you know when they pass, sir, before I commence my walk.’

‘Well, look here,’ exclaimed Denis, ‘let me walk! Dash it, I’m younger than you!’

‘True, sir,’ said George impassively, ‘but, if I may say so, the known tendency of the police to view with suspicion the humoristic tendencies of young College gentlemen, sir, leads me to presuppose that my story might be received at the Cuchester police station with more credulence and with less embarrassment to the narrator than your own, sir.’

Denis was compelled to agree with this reasonable and tactfully-worded exposition, and said reluctantly:

‘You think the police would imagine I was pulling their legs, eh? Yes, there’s something in that. All right, carry on, George, and God bless you!’

George had a further reason for selecting himself as victim. He had a shrewd suspicion that the mealy- mouthed and rather impressive Mr. Cassius, with his air of breeding, his respectable grey hairs and his impeccable clothing and manners, might, if he reached the Cuchester police station first—as, with a fast car, he was almost bound to do, once the angry spivs had mentioned the destination of the lorry—he might, thought George (stepping out with an infantryman’s marching ryhthm) have lodged a complaint with the police of such a nature that whoever came in behind him with news of the lorry would inevitably find himself held for police questioning.

George had that old-fashioned conception of a wage-earner’s loyalty to an employer which socialism has done so well, no doubt, to deflect, emasculate and destroy. He saw it as his plain duty to provide the police with their victim in the form of his own person rather than in that of Mrs. Bradley’s nephew, and was cheerfully prepared to be detained at, and, if necessary, incarcerated in, Cuchester police station. Noblesse oblige was not George’s family motto, but it was his philosophy where his employer was concerned.

Before he commenced his preliminary task, that of watching for a car containing Mr. Cassius (or any other of the men who had been associated so far with the enquiry) to go by, George cut from among the reeds by the water’s edge a fan of leaves, flowers and stems with which, when he returned to the junction of the main road with the turning he had taken, he could sweep away the traces of the lorry’s wheels, for where the lane left the Cuchester road there was a sandy surface, and this continued round the first of the bends. With the tracks in the muddy cattle walk he could do nothing, but this did not matter so long as the passing car went straight on past the turning without the occupants realizing that the lorry was no longer ahead of them. Even if Mr. Cassius-Concaverty stopped to work out the simple mathematical evidence of time, distance and pace it was likely, George thought, that he would believe that the spivs had been mistaken in the exact minute when the lorry had been driven out of the yard. The chances were that Mr. Cassius, intent upon retrieving his pictures before it was too late, would not enter into any calculations at all, but would drive hell-for-leather after the spoil. This was exactly what he did.

Pleased with this proof of a criminal’s psychology, George returned to the lorry, acquainted the young men with the news that the car had passed the turning, and then set out for Cuchester. Denis, Gascoigne and O’Hara took out pipes and indulged in undergraduate speculations upon art, life, sex, politics, ratting in barns, trout-fishing, salmon-fishing, music-hall stars they wished they had seen, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, religion, the Norfolk Broads, and other subjects upon which it was equally possible for all to talk at once and none to listen.

By the time they had exploited these themes, the police arrived and took them and the lorry in charge. Mr. Cassius, it seemed, had claimed his own, but, pending further enquiries, had not yet been permitted to take the pictures away.

Mrs. Bradley performed her errand of reporting to the police at Welsea Beaches, and then she telephoned the Chief Constable, waking him, to his peevish annoyance, from his light, pleasant sleep of the early morning.

‘You ought to be up and about,’ said Mrs. Bradley firmly. ‘Now get out of bed at once, and come and see me. I’ve all sorts of things to tell you, and your Superintendent at Welsea will have things all his own way if you don’t come along and begin to order him about.’

‘But what mare’s-nest have you got for us this time?’

‘A dead body, of course. Two, as a matter of fact, only one was murdered and the other was killed accidentally. Still, you ought to be on the spot. The Druids have danced.’

Upon this infuriatingly mysterious information she hung up and caught the next bus back to Upper Deepening. There was an excellent early morning service of country buses between Welsea and the villages that way, because of a large factory two miles the other side of Cuchester which had been transferred there at the beginning of the