The exclamation was ejected from him so to speak, by the mental shock.
Hoover’s hand shot out to grasp his prey. What happened then was described by Mr. Shonts, the German draper across the way, to a friend.
“The thin man hit Mr. Hoover in the stomack, who sat down, but lifted himself at wance and pursued him.”
Jones ran. After him followed a constable, sprung from nowhere, boys, a dog that seemed running for exercise, and Hoover.
He reached the house of Mrs. Henshaw, pulled the latch key from his pocket, plunged it in the lock, opened the door and shut it. So close was the pursuit on him that the “bang-bang” of the knocker followed at once on the bang of the door.
Then the bell went, peal after peal.
Jones made for the kitchen stairs and bolted down them, found a passage leading to the back door, and, disregarding the bewildered Mrs. Henshaw, who was coming out of the kitchen with her hands all over flour, found the back yard.
A blank wall lay before him, another on the right, and another on the left. The left and right walls divided the Henshaw back yard from the yards of the houses on either side, the wall immediately before him divided it from the back yard of a house in Minerva Terrace, which was parallel to the High Street.
Jones chose this wall. A tenantless dog kennel standing before it helped him, and next moment he was over, shaken up with a drop of twelve feet and facing a clothes line full of linen. He dived under a sheet and almost into the back of a broad woman hanging linen on a second clothes line, found the back door of the house, which the broad woman had left open, ran down a passage, up a kitchen stairs and into a hall. An old gentleman in list slippers, coming out of a room on the right, asked him what he wanted. Jones, recalling the affair later, could hear the old gentleman’s voice and words.
He did not pause to reply. He opened the hall door, and the next moment he was in Minerva Terrace. It was fortunately deserted. He ran to the left, found a bye way and a terrace of artisans’ dwellings, new, hideous, and composed of yellow brick. In front of the terrace lay fields. A gate in the hedge invited him, he climbed over it, crossed a field, found another gate which led him to another field, and found himself surrounded by the silence of the country, a silence pierced and thrilled by the songs of larks. Larks make the sea lands of the south and east coasts insufferable. One lark in a suitable setting, and, for a while, is delightful, but twenty larks in all grades of ascent and descent, some near, some distant, make for melancholy.