He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.
“When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started wondering how they could best be stopped from doing it again. It occurred to me they might be shy of a wild pig or a pug that bit them. So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous animals in cages, warning everybody of the fiercest tigers and panthers that ever were known. When they found it out and didn’t want to let it out, they could only fall back on their own tomfoolery of a prohibition wholesale. Of course, it was the same with my other stunt, about the sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable and refined maladies. The pigs had a dignified, possibly a rather dull time, in elaborately curtained railway carriages with hospital nurses to wait on them; while I stood outside and assured the railway officials that the cure was a rest cure, and the invalids must on no account be disturbed.�
“What a liar you are!� exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.
“Not at all,� said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they were going to be cured.�
Crane, who had been gazing rather abstractedly out of the window, slowly turned his head and said abruptly: “And how’s it going to end? Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?�
Pierce sprang to his feet with a resurrection of all the romantic abandon of his vow over the pig-sty.
“Impossible!� he cried. “You don’t know what you’re saying or how true it is. All I’ve done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and rhymes as impossible—something that has passed into a proverb of the impossible. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will post yourselves in the quarry opposite the Blue Boar, on Thursday week at sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that even the organs of public information will find it hard to hide it.�
It was in that part of the steep fall of pine-wood where the quarry made a sort of ledge under a roof of pine that two gentlemen of something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite of adventure posted themselves with all the preparations due to a picnic or a practical joke. It was from that place, as from a window looking across the valley, that they saw what seemed more like a vision; what seemed indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The large clearance of the western sky was of a luminous lemon tint, as of pale yellow fading to pale green, while one or two loose clouds on the horizon were of a rose-red and yet richer colours. But the setting sun itself was a cloudless fire, so that a tawny light lay over the whole landscape; and the inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost like a house of gold. Owen Hood was gazing in his dreamy fashion, and said at last:
“There’s an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It’s a queer thing, but that cloud coming up the valley is uncommonly like the shape of a pig.�
“Very like a whale,� said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when he turned his eyes in that direction, the eyes were keener. Artists have remarked that a cloud has perspective like anything else; but the perspective of the cloud coming up the valley was curiously solid.