Read Online Appleby Plays Chicken by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

the sort that is athletically well-preserved. But David’s distance had been the mile, and he didn’t think he’d gone exactly flabby. Unless the second man was young and a tolerably good long-distance chap – or unless there was now some quite unlooked-for misfortune – his escape was pretty well in the bag. The realization of this went suddenly to David’s head. Without venturing to look round again, he raised one arm in the air and gave a defiant wave. There was yet another pop from the silly little gun. He brought his arm down and noticed an incredible thing. Its index finger was covered in blood.
    It wasn’t painful, but it was sufficiently sobering, all the same. And now, too, he had to make a sharp detour to get round that awkward tongue of bog. If his pursuers had spotted it sooner than he had – and they might have done this – then they would stand to gain quite a bit by having altered their own course first. And this would then immediately help them in another way, making it possible for them to skirt quite a steep ascent which he must take head on.
    Once more David crammed on a bit of extra speed. And the rising ground proved heavy going underfoot as well, for some accident of soil or exposure made the heather on it thick and high. When he reached the top of this short rise he was glad to see an easy drop to the track, for his breath was coming shorter than, at this stage of the proceedings, was altogether reassuring. And the place really was damned lonely. There was the little track and nothing else – like a neat parting down the spine of some unnaturally well-groomed furry monster. And suddenly everything that was secure and familiar in David’s life – and particularly the recent tranquillities of the George and old Pettifor, Timothy and the infant Ogg and the prosperous fishermen from Lombard Street and Westminster and Pall Mall – seemed dauntingly far away. They seemed far away both in time and in space. He had a glimpse of what it would be like to lose his courage; it would, strangely enough, be quite a different thing from being in the hell of a funk. Hurtling downhill at a pace he recognized as now far too fast for prudence, he had to reason with himself about the special dimensions of the melodrama that had reached out at him. There wasn’t – there just wasn’t – miles and miles and miles of this, although from the top of the rise, just as from the summit of the Tor, it had been precisely this that it looked like. Let him just keep going as he was doing, and he’d be out of this brute solitude in no time.
    But just how? What must he come up with in order to be reasonably secure? David had reached the track by the time this question struck him forcibly. He had remembered from his map that there was a village of sorts straight ahead. But it might be no more than a hamlet – and would there be much security in that?
    Abruptly, as sometimes happened with David’s mind, the answers to his questions began to come not in words but in pictures – vivid and almost hallucinatory pictures, of the kind that will sometimes create themselves in the darkness when one is on the verge of falling asleep. He saw himself frantically interrogating a group of small children on the whereabouts of a non-existent police station, volubly explaining himself to a silver-haired vicar out for a stroll, diving – and this was the most shocking vision of the lot – frantically under a bed in the first cottage he could enter. All this was extremely ludicrous, but it did reflect one quite sober fact, worth getting clear. If there is a fellow after you with a gun, and if he is convinced that it is pretty well your life or his, the point at which you can reckon upon assured safety isn’t exactly easy to hit. This bleak persuasion grew upon David as he ran.
    Of course the beastly little pistol wasn’t inexhaustible, and it wasn’t assured that the gentleman with the good shoes and the nicely trimmed moustache had