Here Comes a Chopper Read Free

tankards, returned to his place, lighted a cigarette for Dorothy and a pipe for himself, and spread out the map on the table.
    It showed what they thought was the roadhouse, and from it they traced their route to the
Dog and Duck
.
    ‘Here we are,’ said Roger. ‘Now, then, where shall we go?’
    They discussed the possibilities for twenty minutes or so, and then, having mapped out their route and paid the score, they walked up the village street and came on to a by-pass road. It ran between fields with green hedges. They crossed the road and entered a high, narrow lane. Among the ground-ivy and wood anemones were dog violets. Roger, picking them carefully so as to have the stalks as long as possible, gathered a handful and gave them to the girl. Beneath their feet was the soft brown decadence of leaf-mould, spongy with rain. On one side a hill dropped down to a valley with a stream, and then the land rose in another rounded slope beyond the water. The top of thehill was crowned absurdly with holly, and farther on were beech-woods, their trunks austere, their long buds gleaming copper-coloured and having points like spears.
    There was plenty to see: the many-feathered birds, a grey horse harrowing the hillside, the rich brown turn of the soil; in the distance the quick green of larches springing like fire in the smoky, dim brown of the taller trees behind them.
    The two walked, paused and loitered, and then at last stepped out. The path dropped to fields hedged with hawthorns, and passed a cow-byre with four young, sleepy Alderneys. Farther on was the farmhouse. The farmyard was powerfully heralded by its midden, a knee-deep mass of manure and filthy straw. On the opposite side of the path a dilapidated notice-board, surmounted by the shape of a hand cut in wood, seemed to indicate some sort of sign-post, but nothing in particular could be learned from it, and the path it pointed out was narrower, more overgrown and more muddy than the one they were already following.
    Roger took out the map once more, and Dorothy looked at her watch. It was past five o’clock, and the lane showed no sign of terminating. Apart from the isolated farmhouse, they had passed no buildings for three hours.
    ‘We ought to be within sight of Dorsey,’ said Roger, ‘but I’m hanged if we are. We ought to have crossed More Heath common half an hour or more ago. Curse this confounded map! It must be wrong.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the girl. ‘Let’s follow the path as far as that gate down there, and then, if it still seems wrong. we’ll come back to this other little path.’
    Roger took out his pocket compass and stared at it in perplexity.
    ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘We’ve gone wrong somewhere. We ought to be walking north-east, but we’re not. We’ve veered round to north-west. I’ll tell you what I think, and you can call me names if you like. I think I picked the wrong footpath to take from that village. You know—where we stopped for grub. I’m sure now that this is the one we should have taken.’
    He pointed with the stem of his pipe.
    ‘Oh, well, never mind. It’s been just as good a walk, I expect,’ said Dorothy.
    ‘That’s one way to argue, but I do dislike to be wrong. Besides, the further we go along here, the further we get off our route.’
    ‘We can get on to some other route, then. I don’t think it really matters.’
    ‘That’s all very well. Still, perhaps we’d better carry on, as we’ve come this far. It looks to me as though that gate of yours bars our way. Doesn’t it seem to you as though it’s right across the path?’
    This did not prove to be the case. The lane made a sharp bend, and this brought the gate into full view. It opened on to unpromising, bramble-entangled land which scarcely seemed worth the fencing, but the path continued downhill.
    Just as the couple reached the gate, a prospectopened which made them feel more cheerful. Bracken, the new shoots just