By JOHN BUCHAN
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY * BOSTON
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
MAJOR-GENERAL
SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.
MY DEAR GENERAL:
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour inthe dug-outs and billets of the British front, as beingsufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men whohave little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasyregion have asked for more. So I have printed this story,written in the smooth days before the war, in the hopethat it may enable an honest man here and there to forgetfor an hour the too urgent realities. I have put yourname on it, because among the many tastes which weshare one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
J.B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase
II. I First Hear of Mr. Andrew Lumley
III. Tells of a Midsummer Night
IV. I Follow the Trail of the Super-Butler
V. I Take a Partner
VI. The Restaurant in Antioch Street
VII. I Find Sanctuary
VIII. The Power-House
IX. Return of the Wild Geese
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for theduck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Sincefive in the morning we had been out on theskerries, and had been blown home by a wind whichthreatened to root the house and its wind-blownwoods from their precarious lodgment on the hill.A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner inone, had occupied us till the last daylight departed,and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room fora sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.
Conversation, I remember, turned on some ofJim's trophies which grinned at us from the firelitwalls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. ThenHoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on theBramaputra, told us some queer things about hisdoings in New Guinea, where he tried to climbCarstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jimsaid he couldn't abide mud—anything was betterthan a country where your boots rotted. (He wasto get enough of it last winter in the YpresSalient.) You know how one tale begets another,and soon the whole place hummed with oddrecollections, for five of us had been a good deal aboutthe world.
All except Leithen, the man who was afterwardsSolicitor-General, and, they say, will get to theWoolsack in time. I don't suppose he had everbeen farther from home than Monte Carlo, buthe liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn abouthis experiences on a Boundary Commission nearLake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.
"Lucky devils," he said. "You've had all thefun out of life. I've had my nose to the grindstoneever since I left school."
I sa