Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/82

 action in time of war. Well, in June, a very great swell was coming over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a statement of the disposition of the British home fleet on mobilisation. At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow, it was something uncommonly important. But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London—others at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call them collectively the "Black Stone." They represented not our allies, but our deadly foes, and the information, destined for France, was to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember—used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes, suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.

This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that hummed in my brain, as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.

My first impulse had been to write a letter