SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ get the stag as far as the Doran, they must find some way across. There’s none at present. Hadn’t we better build a bridge?”

      The stream, in ordinary weather a wide channel of stones where a slender current falls in amber pools, was now a torrent four yards wide. But it was a deceptive torrent with more noise than strength, and save in the pools was only a foot or two deep. There were many places where a stag could have been easily lugged through by an able-bodied man. But the bridge-building proposal was welcomed, since it provided relief for both from an atmosphere which had suddenly become heavily charged. At a point where the channel narrowed between two blaeberry-thatched rocks it was possible to make an inclined bridge from one bank to the other. The materials were there in the shape of sundry larch-poles brought from the lower woods for the repair of a bridge on the Crask road. Archie dragged half a dozen to the edge and pushed them across. Then Janet marched through the water, which ran close to the top of her riding-boots, and prepared the abutment on the farther shore, weighting the poles down with sods broken from an adjacent bank.

      “I’m coming over,” she cried. “If it will bear a stag, it will bear me.”

      “No, you’re not,” Archie commanded. “I’ll come to you.”

      “The last time I saw you cross a stream you fell in,” she reminded him.

      Archie tested the contrivance, but it showed an ugly inclination to behave like a see-saw, being insufficiently weighted on Janet’s side.

      “Wait a moment. We need more turf,” and she disappeared from sight beyond a knoll. When she returned she was excessively muddy as to hands and garments.

      “I slipped in that beastly peat-moss,” she explained. “I never saw such hags, and there’s no turf to be got except with a spade…No, you don’t! Keep off that bridge, please. It isn’t nearly safe yet. I’m going to roll down stones.”

      Roll down stones she did till she had erected something very much like a cairn at her end, which would have opposed a considerable barrier to the passage of any stag. Then she announced that she must get clean, and went a few yards down-stream to one of the open shallows, where she proceeded to make a toilet. She stood with the current flowing almost to her knees, suffering it to wash the peat from her boots and the skirts of her oilskin and at the same time scrubbing her grimy hands. In the process her hat became loose, dropped into the stream, and was clutched with one hand, while with the other she restrained the efforts of the wind to uncoil her shining curls.

      It was while watching the moving waters at their priest-like task that crisis came upon Sir Archie. In a blinding second he realised with the uttermost certainty that he had found his mate. He had known it before, but now came the flash of supreme conviction…For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road—they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds—her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict. It is a sad commentary on the young man’s education, but, while his soul was bubbling with poetry, the epithet which kept recurring to his mind was “clean-run.”…More, far more. He saw in that moment of revelation a comrade who would never fail him, with whom he could keep on all the roads of life. It was that which all his days he had been confusedly seeking.”

      “Janet,” he shouted against the wind, “will you marry me?”

      She made a trumpet of one hand.

      “What do you say?” she cried.

      “Will you marry me?”

      “Yes,” she turned a laughing face, “of course I will.”

      “I’m coming across,” he shouted.

      “No. Stay where you are. I’ll come to you.”

      She climbed the other bank and made for the bridge of larch-poles, and before he could prevent her she had embarked on that crazy structure. Then that happened which might have been foreseen, since the poles on Archie’s side of the stream had no fixed foundation. They splayed out, and he was just in time to catch her in his arms as she sprang.

      “You darling girl,” he said, and she turned up to him a face smiling no more, but very grave.

      Archie, his arms full of dripping maiden, stood in a happy trance.

      “Please put me down,” she said. “See, the mist is clearing. We must get into cover.”

      Sure enough the haze was lifting from the hill-side before them and long tongues of black moorland were revealed stretching up to the crags. They found a place among the birches which gave them a safe prospect and fetched luncheon from the car. Hot coffee from a thermos was the staple of the meal, which they consumed like two preoccupied children. Archie looked at his watch and found it after two-o’clock. “Something must begin to happen soon,” he said, and they took up position side by side on a sloping rock, Janet with her Zeiss glasses and Archie with his telescope.

      His head was a delicious merry-go-round of hopes and dreams. It was full of noble thoughts—about Janet, and himself, and life. And the thoughts were mirthful too—a great, mellow, philosophic mirthfulness. John Macnab was no longer an embarrassing hazard, but a glorious adventure. It did not matter what happened—nothing could happen wrong in this spacious and rosy world. If Lamancha succeeded, it was a tremendous joke, if he failed a more tremendous, and, as for Leithen and Palliser-Yeates, comedy had marked them for its own…He wondered what he had done to be blessed with such happiness.

      Already the mist had gone from the foreground, and the hills were clear to half-way up the rocks of Sgurr Mor and Sgurr Dearg. He had his glass on the Beallach, on the throat of which a stray sun-gleam made a sudden patch of amethyst.

      “I see someone,” Janet cried. “On the edge of the pass. Have you got it?—on the left-hand side of that spout of stones.”

      Archie found the place. “Got him…By Jove, it’s Wattie…And— and—yes, by all the gods, I believe he’s pullin’ a stag down…Wait a second…Yes, he’s haulin’ it into the burn…Well done, our side! But where on earth is Charles?”

      The two lay with their eyes glued on the patch of hill, now lit everywhere by the emerging sun. They saw the little figure dip into a hollow, appear again and then go out of sight in the upper part of a long narrow scaur which held the headwaters of a stream—they could see the foam of the little falls farther down. Before it disappeared Archie had made out a stag’s head against a background of green moss. “That’s that,” he cried. “Charles must be somewhere behind protectin’ the rear. I suppose Wattie knows what he’s doin’ and is certain he can’t be seen by the navvies. Anyhow, he’s well hidden at present in the burn, but he’ll come into view lower down when the ravine opens out. He’s a tough old bird to move a beast at that pace…The question now is, where is old John? It’s time he was gettin’ busy.”

      Janet, whose glass made up in width of range what it lacked in power, suddenly cried out: “I see him. Look! up at the edge of the rocks— three hundred yards west of the Beallach. He’s moving down-hill. I think it’s Palliser-Yeates—he’s the part of John Macnab I know best.”

      Archie found the spot. “It’s old John right СКАЧАТЬ