Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/106

 If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land—there is only one chance of escape. You must stay in the patch, and let your enemies search it and not find you. That was good sense, but how on earth was I to escape notice in that tablecloth of a place?

I would have buried myself to the neck in mud or lain below water or climbed the tallest tree. But there was not a stick of wood, the bog-holes were little puddles, the stream was a slender trickle. There was nothing but short heather and bare hill bent and the white highway.

Then in a tiny bight of road, beside a heap of stones, I found the Roadman.

He had just arrived, and was wearily flinging down his hammer. He looked at me with a fishy eye and yawned.

"Confoond the day I ever left the herdin'!" he said as if to the world at large. "There I was my ain maister. Now I'm a slave to the government, tethered to the roadside, wi' sair een, and a back like a suckle."

He took up the hammer, struck a stone,