CHAPTER THREE
THE ADVENTURE OF THE LITERARY INNKEEPER
I had a solemn time travelling north that day. It was fine May weather, with the hawthorn flowering on every hedge, and I asked myself why, when I was still a free man, I had stayed on in London and not got the good of this heavenly country. I didn’t dare face the restaurant car, but I got a luncheon-basket at Leeds and shared it with the fat woman. Also I got the morning’s papers, with news about starters for the Derby and the beginning of the cricket season, and some paragraphs about how Balkan affairs were settling down and a British squadron was going to Kiel.
When I had done with them I got out Scudder’s little black pocket-book and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings, chiefly figures, though now and then a name
