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 heater (Hinchcliffe blessed it and its maker for three minutes) was leaking beyond hope of repair; she had shifted most of her packing, and her waterpump would not lift.

"If I had a bit of piping I could disconnect this tin cartridge-case an’ feed direct into the boiler. It ’ud knock down her speed, but we could get on," said he, and looked hopelessly at the long dun ridges that hove us above the panorama of Sussex. Northward we could see the London haze. Southward, between gaps of the whale-backed Downs, lay the Channel’s zinc-blue. But all our available population in that vast survey was one cow and a kestrel.

"It’s down hill to Instead Wick. We can run her there by gravity," I said at last.

"Then he’ll only have to walk to the station to get home. Unless we take off ’is boots first," Pyecroft replied.

"That," said our guest earnestly, "would be theft atop of assault and very serious."

"Oh, let’s hang him an’ be done," Hinchcliffe grunted. "It’s evidently what he’s sufferin’ for."

Somehow murder did not appeal to us that warm noon. We sat down to smoke in the heather, and presently out of the valley below came the thick beat of a petrol-motor ascending. I paid little attention to it till I heard the roar of a horn that has no duplicate in all the Home Counties.

"That’s the man I was going to lunch with!" I cried. "Hold on!" and I ran down the road.

It was a big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued