I reckoned that that was the safest
way, for the police would naturally assume that I was always making
farther from London in the direction of some western port. I
thought I had still a good bit of a start, for, as I reasoned, it would
take some hours to fix the blame on me, and several more to
identify the fellow who got on board the train at St Pancras.
It was the same jolly, clear spring weather, and I simply could
not contrive to feel careworn. Indeed I was in better spirits than I
had been for months. Over a long ridge of moorland I took my
road, skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called
Cairnsmore of Fleet. Nesting curlews and plovers were crying everywhere,
and the links of green pasture by the streams were dotted
with young lambs. All the slackness of the past months was slipping
from my bones, and I stepped out like a four-year-old. By-and-by I
came to a swell of moorland which dipped to the vale of a little
river, and a mile away in the heather I saw the smoke of a train.
The station, when I reached it, proved to be ideal for my purpose.
The moor surged up around it and left room only for the single
line, the slender siding, a waiting-room, an office, the station-
master's cottage, and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william.
There seemed no road to it from anywhere, and to increase the
desolation the waves of a tarn lapped on their grey granite beach
half a mile away.
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