A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household Page B

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,