“Have you a pistol?” he asked.

I replied that I hadn’t. As a matter of fact I had. I didn’t want to part with an old wartime friend, though to retain it was downright illegal. But I did not want to put myself into temptation. I had enough trouble as it was.

I warned Cecily that if anyone called or telephoned she was to say I had gone to bed with a touch of flu and was asleep.

“Darling, don’t forget there are three of us who depend on you,” she said.

I told her I never thought of anything else.

I slipped out of the back door, crossed the meadows and waded the stream. As the crow flies the distance to Blossom’s farm wasn’t more than three miles, but the crow didn’t make Dorset footpaths, and I had to step out smartly to reach the haystacks in an hour.

It was a blustery evening with a few fierce showers and comparative calm between. The weather report was of strong winds over the North Sea, rising at times to gale force. With us it was a good enough night for a clandestine landing, but I didn’t think it would appear so at the point of departure.

After crossing a steep little green range, I sploshed down a muddy cart track and hit the lower road south of Blossom’s house. I hoped that the statistician was there in the rain, taking a census of laborers returning from the village pub. Then I turned off into a dry valley which led up to the back of the shoot. My feet on the turf made no sound. It was very dark, and a solid object could only be distinguished thirty yards away. I knew that I couldn’t be observed or followed.

I arrived at the stacks silently and on the hour. I couldn’t see Sandorski, and he gave me the worst fright of the evening when he spoke from the level of my feet. He was lying on an old tarpaulin, which I had already touched to be sure that tarpaulin it was, and absolutely invisible.

He told me that the beacons had been set up at dusk, just as I had prophesied; they were, he thought, of transpontor type, and each had been easily carried by two men. All this he had seen from the top of a beech in the boundary hedge, where he had been on watch every afternoon and evening. After it was darkish, he had heard the party going back to the upper road. Thereupon he trotted down to the village to telephone me.

“Any plan?” I asked.

“Not yet. What are we up against? Don’t know!”

We took position not far from the southern beacon. About nine we heard their footsteps. They must have moved very quietly as far as the boundary hedge. Then they had to cross a strip of plowland strewn with large flints. I had never discovered a way of walking silently over those flints, nor did they.

So far as we could tell, they crossed the plowland and settled down somewhere on the edge of the grass. Since I knew every foot of the surface and Sandorski did not, I left him in our hiding place and explored, stopping frequently to listen. I spotted them first by the flare of a match. They felt confident enough to smoke. I crawled over the turf till I was within twenty yards of them. They were still a party of four. In the glow of the cigarette ends I felt pretty certain that I recognized Hiart.

Their voices were low, and I could only distinguish a few sentences in the hush between the passing gusts of wind. I should have said the hush was complete, but, when one tried to listen, there were smaller breezes playing through the dead thistle stalks, or the flap of their mackintoshes, or, just as a whisper was giving the clue to previous half-guessed words, the tiny crepitation of insect or field mouse close to my ear. I gathered, at any rate, that the plane was starting from Austria, that it would refuel in

France on the return journey, and that they too thought it wouldn’t come. They were prepared to wait for it again on the following night.

I returned to the general with my news. We sat where we were, and about an hour before midnight someone came to the beacon and presumably switched off the battery. He didn’t go through the gap in the boundary hedge and off to the road, but back to rejoin the rest of his party on the down. Sandorski leaped at the opportunity to get away before them, see what was the number of their car and whether there was anyone waiting in it.

It was too bold, even on so dark a night, for after we passed the gap they weren’t more than a hundred yards behind us. We silently increased our lead and then, finding no car at all at the junction of the track and the upper road, dropped into the ditch and let them pass us. We trailed them at a reasonable distance–at least it seemed reasonable to Sandorski–and discovered that they had left their car half a mile down the road, just up a little metaled track which ran through a patch of woodland. When they drove away, there were still only four men in the car, so we knew that it had been left unguarded. The People’s Union, for all its thousands of innocent enthusiasts, seemed to be a bit short of manpower for a job of this delicacy.

I slept deeply and late, foreseeing that the next night I might have little chance, and at my office pretended to be bravely carrying on in spite of that incipient flu. My clerk was sympathetic. It may seem unnecessarily grand for a plain salesman to boast a clerk–but we had a few big contracts, and I needed someone to sit within reach of the telephone when I was out. The job suited him. He was over sixty, reliable and fatherly. He said that my eyes were altogether too clear and bright, and that I looked like an aunt of his just before she died. It might, I thought, well be so. I’ve seen plenty of men whose eyes were clear and bright just before they died. Only they didn’t know they were going to.

His confounded aunt put ideas into my head. I wrote down for Cecily a short account of what had happened, sealed it up, and took the envelope round to the bank. I didn’t feel the office safe was secure enough.

In the evening I played with the boys, and ate an early supper. I told Cecily that I had to go out, and that I hoped this would be the last night of the investigation. She didn’t know quite what to make of my mood, for I was in good spirits. It seemed to me more and more unlikely that I should ever be in the dock for manslaughter. Anything else that was coming to me I could handle.

Soon after half-past seven I was with Sandorski, tucked into the hedge above the southern beacon. An hour later the party arrived, and stood quite close to us while they checked and switched on the beacon. Pink and Hiart we recognized beyond doubt. The other two were unknown to either of us. They were not as careful as they had been the night before. Growing familiarity with the job, perhaps. And really there was no reason why they should be careful. It was a million to one against anybody being out of doors on the open ground of Blossom’s and the adjoining farm.

The night was clear, with a niggling northwest wind which was damp and cold out of all proportion to its strength. The four men didn’t lie out again on the edge of their airstrip; they retired to the comfortable shelter of the boundary hedge.

It was their distance from the beacons and the top of the down that gave Sandorski his crazy inspiration. He suddenly slapped me on the back.

“Why not?” he asked me in a yell of a whisper. “Why not?”

His tone was all full of irresponsible cavalry tactics. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he suggested chasing Hiart over the downs with a lance. I replied that I’d tell him why not at once, if I knew what he was proposing.

“Why not shift the beacons?”

“Wreck the plane?”

“Hell, no! Welcome it! Reception committee, ha? We ought to have three minutes. Might have much more.”

I protested at the outrageous gamble.

“Gamble? What gamble? They can’t know the plane is coming down in the wrong place till it’s down there.”

“But why? What’s the objective?”