The Blue Pavilions

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

The pair picked themselves up as their comrades leapt past them. Dick snatched up his second pistol, and resumed the pursuit without troubling his head about the burgher.

The burgher picked himself up and extracted the ball—from the folds of his voluminous breeches. Then he went indoors for ointment and plaster, the flame of the powder having scorched him severely. Later he had the bent guelder (which had diverted the bullet) fastened to a little gold chain, and his wife wore it always on the front of her bodice. Finally it became an heirloom in a thriving Dutch family.

But he was a very slow man, and all this took a considerable time. Meanwhile we have left Tristram running, about thirty yards ahead of his foremost enemy.

He gained the end of the quiet suburb, still maintaining his distance, and scanned the landscape in front. Evening was descending fast. To his right he saw the waters of a broad canal glimmering under the grey sky. Straight before him the high-road ran, without so much as a tree to shelter him, for miles. On the horizon a score of windmills waved their arms like beckoning ghosts. He was a good swimmer. It flashed upon him that his one hope was to make for the canal and strike for the farther bank. There was a reasonable chance of shaking off one or more of his pursuers by this device.

He leapt the narrow ditch that ran parallel with the road, and began to bear across the green meadows in a line which verged towards the canal-bank, at an angle sufficiently acute to prevent his foes from intercepting him by a short cut. By their shouts he judged that his guess was fairly correct, and the prospect of having to swim the canal daunted them somewhat. He looked over his shoulder. The pace had told upon three of them, but one man had actually gained on him, and could not be more than twenty strides behind.

"I shall have to settle with this fellow," he thought. "He is going to catch me up before I reach the bank."

His first wind was failing him, and his heart began to thump against his ribs. He spied a beaten path at this point that trended across the meadow at a blunter angle than the one he was following. Almost unconsciously he began to reason as follows:

"A beaten path is usually the shortest cut: also, to follow it is usually to escape the risk of meeting unforeseen obstacles. But if I change the angle at which I am running for one more obtuse, I give my pursuer the advantage of ten yards or so. Yes; but I shorten the distance to be covered, and, moreover, this is a long-distance man, and he is wearing me down."

Though this process of reasoning appeared to him deliberate enough, in point of fact he had worked it out and put the conclusion into practice in a couple of bounds. As he darted aside and along the footpath he could hear the momentary break in his antagonist's stride.

Tristram had hardly turned into this footpath, however, before he saw the occasion of it. Just before him lay a plank, and beneath the plank a sunken dyke, dividing the meadow so unexpectedly that at fifty yards' distance the green lips seemed to meet in one continuous stretch of turf. And yet the dyke was full forty feet wide. He leapt on to the swaying bridge and across to the farther edge, almost without a glance at the sluggish black water under his feet.