Appleby Plays Chicken

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Authors: Michael Innes
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of a perfectly respectable potential ally – well, it was just too bad.
    David looked behind him. His first enemies, he saw, were now on the move again. He looked to his left. Here, on the edge of the moor, there was really a good deal of cover: broken ground with here and there a thicket or a spinney, running down to a shallow valley in which a stream appeared to run through long, narrow plantations. David swung round and raced for a promising little gully he had spotted no farther off than a stone’s throw. Something whined past his head. He thought it must have been an insect close to his ear – until a fraction of a second later he heard a crack behind him.
    Well, he hadn’t been wrong. Doubled up and racing as he hadn’t raced before, he told himself there was some satisfaction in that. But there was small satisfaction in anything else. A rifle – even a light sporting rifle – entirely altered the complexion of things. In skilled hands it meant nothing else than quick death – or it certainly meant that if he were driven back towards the open moor. His best chance lay in taking substantial risks in order to work rapidly round to the village. They couldn’t – they just couldn’t – pursue him into that with guns blazing. This that he’d strayed into wasn’t a 3D western. There was – there just must be – in every sense a limit to how far they could go.
    The next stage of David’s flight was curiously insubstantial and shadowy. His brain didn’t seem to have much control of it. And yet it wasn’t blundering or precipitate. Indeed what it now for the first time chiefly required was a great deal of wariness and calculation. The terrain – almost before his noticing it – had entirely changed; he moved behind the cover of high earthen dykes, crawled through thickets, lay listening in a ditch for sounds that didn’t come.
    Slowly he realized that – perhaps just by letting something primitive to the point of mindlessness take over – he had shaken off his pursuers entirely for a time. He didn’t know for what sort of time, because it was chiefly his sense of time that had gone queer. What he did sharply retain was a sense of direction. He knew just where that village was. Over a field, up the stream, round a bend, and there it would be. Indeed he could see what must be the first of its cottages, white-walled and grey-thatched, just where the stream wound out of sight. It was hard not to believe that he had a clear road to safety. There were sheep in the field; he could hear a dog barking; and from a direction hard to fix there came the low throb of an engine – he supposed it must be some sort of pump. His enemies seemed to belong to a past he couldn’t very clearly remember. Probably they had gone home to tea.
    It was when he caught himself with this childish thought in his head that David realized the possible danger of a treachery within. Quite suddenly he had become rather shamefully fagged out. That was it. If he wasn’t careful, he’d simply be sitting down in the middle of that field and counting the daisies. Chaps like that don’t go home to tea. As soon as you give them the slip, and they can’t any longer actually come pounding after you, they start thinking ahead. They start doing your thinking for you. That means they know it’s the village there that you’re trying to make. So they form a screen before it.
    Crouched by the side of a gate, peering cautiously into the utterly peaceful field beyond, David told himself he hadn’t got that quite right. It was almost a certain bet that they were indeed between him and the village – but, after all, there wasn’t a whole troop of them. They couldn’t be, as it were, manning a line. They would be at vantage points. And they’d give him credit by this time for a good deal of cunning and caution. They’d be watching the tricky approaches, the clever ways in, the sequences of adequate cover one used to be made to trace out on field

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