and then on foot,
after discharging the taxi, to strike directly into the line of tumbled
sand-dunes which, remote and undisturbed and full of large convenient
hollows, stretched along the coast above the flat beach. Any of those
hollows, he knew, might prove to contain the duellists in the very act
of firing, and over the rim of each he had to pop his unprotected head.
He (if in time) would have to separate the combatants, and who knew
whether, in their very natural chagrin at being interrupted, they might
not turn their combined pistols on him first, and settle with each
other afterwards? One murder the more made little difference to
desperate men. Other shocks, less deadly but extremely unnerving, might
await him. He might be too late, and pop his head over the edge of one
of these craters, only to discover it full of bleeding if not mangled
bodies. Or there might be only one mangled body, and the other,
unmangled, would pursue him through the sand-dunes and offer him life at
the price of silence. That, he painfully reflected, would be a very
difficult decision to make. Luckily, Captain Puffin (if he proved to be
the survivor) was lame....

With drawn face and agonized prayers on his lips, he began a systematic
search of the sand-dunes. Often his nerve nearly failed him, and he
would sink panting among the prickly bents before he dared to peer into
the hollow up the sides of which he had climbed. His ears shuddered at
the anticipation of hearing from near at hand the report of pistols, and
once a back-fire from a motor passing along the road caused him to leap
high in the air. The sides of these dunes were steep, and his shoes got
so full of sand, that from time to time, in spite of the urgency of his
errand, he was forced to pause in order to empty them out. He stumbled
in rabbit holes, he caught his foot and once his trousers in strands of
barbed wire, the remnant of coast defences in the Great War, he crashed
among potsherds and abandoned kettles; but with a thoroughness that did
equal credit to his wind and his Christian spirit, he searched a mile of
perilous dunes from end to end, and peered into every important hollow.
Two hours later, jaded and torn and streaming with perspiration, he
came, in the vicinity of the club-house, to the end of his fruitless
search.

He staggered round the corner of it and came in view of the eighteenth
green. Two figures were occupying it, and one of these was in the act of
putti