Appleby Plays Chicken by Michael Innes Page A

you sometimes didn’t feel the pain for quite a time. But he was continuing to run all right – and now he heard nothing but the sounds of his own flight. It was ignominious. Still, he was retreating in fairly good order – very literally watching his step in this treacherous ground, and using his wits about the best course to choose. At the same time he was extremely frightened. The thought passed through his mind that it wasn’t in the least like any feeling he’d experienced in Timothy’s car the night before. Yet his present danger must be much less, for the stranger’s pistol was next to useless to him at this range, and he himself had a lead that an elderly man wasn’t at all likely to reduce, even if he attempted pursuit at all.
    Making sure that there were no pitfalls for a few yards ahead, David glanced over his shoulder. He hadn’t done the fellow justice. He must have got down from the rocks quite as quickly as David had; and now he was coming on with what one could see at a glance to be an athlete’s movement. David speeded up. At the same time he found himself doing odd sums: calculating the square miles of actual solitude available in this part of the world for the fantastic hunted-man affair he seemed to have become involved in; calculating the stranger’s age and correlating it with his likely stamina.
    And slowly – so that he must have covered several hundred yards during the process – David’s unworthy funk did a little drain from him. He had nothing to be afraid of now except carelessness or bad luck. A heavy tumble, a twist of an ankle, and he was done for. But if he was so soft that he was actually overtaken by his pursuer in a straight race, then he just deserved whatever came to him.
    He looked back again. The stranger had neither gained nor lost ground. He seemed to be fumbling in a pocket as he ran, so that David wondered if he were reaching for cartridges to reload his beastly little pistol. Then the stranger put his hand up to his mouth and blew a shrill blast on a whistle.
    It came to David chiefly as outrageous, as enormous cheek. It was what a policeman would do if you snatched a fellow’s watch and ran. Yet it was the stranger who was a criminal – and a criminal of the lethal sort. David looked ahead. The moor fell away from him in gentle undulations, and in the distance he could just distinguish a line of posts. On every fourth or fifth post there would be a hawk… The memory seemed to represent security – and indeed he knew that a couple of miles along that track there was a metalled road and then a village. At the moment, he had only to go straight ahead.
    Suddenly, he realized that this was just what he couldn’t do. That whistle had effected something. Dead in front of him, although several hundred yards away, a man seemed to have arisen up out of the moor. And there was no mistaking his movements. He had answered a summons to join in the pursuit. The chase, David realized at once and grimly, took on a different character instantly. Two to one. That made it hare and hounds.

 
     
7
     
    It was nonsense, David told himself as he swung sharply to his right. To come upon a crime of violence, hard on its commission, was in itself an unlikely adventure enough. Still, such things did happen; and one man had pretty well the same remote chance of becoming involved as another. As far as the theory of probability went, David had, so to speak, nothing much to complain of. It was like winning a lottery at very long odds, or gaining some vast sum on the Pools; there was nothing in it to be surprised at. That was what Pettifor, no doubt, would point out with his easy lucidity if the matter was put to him.
    Keeping a wary eye on his new antagonist, David found himself irrationally disposed to laugh as he ran. Whether this meant that he was further recovering from his funk, he didn’t know. What was laughable was the spectacle of his own mind continuing, in this queer exigency, to