Free Mysterious Aviator by Nevil Shute

immersed in the leading article. I don’t generally read the leaders in
The Times
. They’re not much in my line. I’ve never taken much stock of politics or legislation or the affairs of state. But that day it was different. I wanted to find out exactly how matters stood, and as I sat there that morning, on the edge of the gun-room table in the sunlight, reading that leading article, I realised that things had gone further in the direction of a breach with Russsia than I had dreamed.
    Lenden was awake when I got back to the house. I looked in at the door of his room for a moment before breakfast. He was very hot and restless in bed. He remarked thickly that he had a ruddy mouth like the bottom of the parrot’s cage.
    He said there wasn’t anything that he wanted.
    “Better stay where you are for the present, then,” I replied, and retired to my bacon and eggs.
    I looked in on him again before I went out. He was feeling very thick and rotten, and was evidently in for a pretty sharp bout of fever. I sat chatting with him for a bit, and then rang up the housekeeper and asked her to send over a thermometer. He had a temperature of about a hundred and two.
    In ordinary circumstances I’d have sent for a doctor at that point. You can’t afford to go messing about with a temperature like that. Lenden wouldn’t hear of it. He said he knew what had to be done—lie in bed and take quinine and neat brandy till it went off. That seemed very reasonable to me; in any case, it was the treatment that had cured this thing before. It might have been rather difficult to explain him to the doctor, too; I didn’t want his presence in Under advertised more than necessary, until I knew what he was going to do.
    He didn’t want anything to eat. I made him comfortable and went over and had a chat with Mrs. Richards, the housekeeper. I wasn’t very happy about leaving him in a strangehouse in that condition, and told her to send over someone every couple of hours or so to see that he was all right. More than that I couldn’t do; I left him some books and a decanter of brandy, got out my car, and went off to my office in Under.
    My office is in the main street of the town, about a hundred yards from the market. I rent a couple of rooms there for the business, in the same building as the Rural District Council and the Waterworks Company. I had a good bit to do that morning, I remember, because it was getting on towards Quarter Day. However, at about half-past eleven I left my clerk to cope with the rest of it, and got going on the road for Pithurst.
    I had to go. There was a chap there who’d made a real effort to get a pedigree herd of shorthorns together. Arner was keen on all pedigree stock, and we’d helped him quite a lot. This chap had put every bean he’d got into this herd, and borrowed a lot he hadn’t, and then died. It really was rather important that I should be there to watch the sale. I had a long chat with Arner about it a couple of days before. We fixed it that if things began to go badly I was to start running the price up on one or two of the young bulls; if they came to us by the hammer we could ship them out to Las Plantas and get a good bit of our money back that way.
    As it happened, that wasn’t necessary. There was a fellow there who’d come up from Devon for the sale and really wanted the whole lot, I believe. Or at any rate, the heifers and young bulls. I’m not sure that if I’d gone to him privately he wouldn’t have made an offer for the whole issue as it stood; still, we’d arranged an auction, and there were a good many of the local people interested. This Devon chap would have had it all his own way in spite of that, if I hadn’t been there. Time after time I ran him up to a decent price for the beast when the locals had dropped out, and then left him to it. As things turned out he paid a pretty fair average price for what he had, and by the time we’d finished he was ready to see me dead. The