Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/202

nation of his thoughts, he found himself climbing once more the steep path that led up the railway embankment and on to the forbidden precincts of the line.

St. Luke's summer still held; the comparative silence of man's Sabbath conspired with the autumn stillness of nature⁠—the sunshine quiet that is disturbed no longer by clicking grasshoppers, nor yet by cawing rooks⁠—to hush the countryside. Far below him he could see the golfers at their orisons, fulfilling, between hope and fear, the daily cycle of their existence. Gordon and Carmichael were at the third tee now; he could have waved to them. Carmichael always made too much business about addressing the ball. Over there was the neglected house, itself radiating the silence of a forgotten past. All else was drowsing; he alone, Mordaunt Reeves, strode on relentlessly in pursuit of crime.

He threw himself down at full length on the bank, just beneath the line. "Now," he said, talking to himself out loud, "you are in the fast train from London to Binver, Mordaunt Reeves. It has stopped only once at a station, Weighford; probably oftener outside stations, because it is a foggy day and the trains get through slowly, with little fog-signals going off at intervals. If you fired a pistol at a fellow-passenger, it would probably be mistaken for a fog-signal by the people in the next carriage. Is that worth thinking of, I wonder? No, there must have been traces of a wound if a wound had been made, and it would have come out