ll five
o'clock set the little homestead a-going once more.

They refused any payment, and by six I had breakfasted and was striding
southwards again. My notion was to return to the railway line a
station or two farther on than the place where I had alighted yesterday
and to double back. 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. I
waited in the deep heather till I saw the smoke of an east-going train
on the horizon. Then I approached the tiny booking-office and took a
ticket for Dumfries.

The only occupants of the carriage were an old shepherd and his dog--a
wall-eyed brute that I mistrusted. The man was asleep, and on the
cushions beside him was that morning's SCOTSMAN. Eagerly I seized on
it, for I fancied it would tell me something.

There were two columns about the Portland Place Murder, as it was
called. My man Paddock had given the alarm and had the milkman
arrested. Poor devil, it looked as if the latter had earned his
sovereign hardly; but for me he had been cheap at the price, for he
seemed to have occupied the police for the bette