After all the old fellow was deaf....
The sunset found the Captain on a breezy common forty miles away from the Redlake Royal Hotel and by this time he knew that fugitive boys cannot be trusted to follow the lines even of the soundest inductions. This business meant a search.
Should he pelt back to Redlake and start again more thoroughly on the morrow?
A moment of temptation.
If he did he knew she wouldn’t let him go.
No!
NO!
He must make a sweeping movement through the country to the left, trying up and down the roads that, roughly speaking, radiated from Redlake between the twenty-fifth and the thirty-fifth milestone....
It was night and high moonlight when at last the Captain reached Crayminster, that little old town decayed to a village, in the Crays valley. He was hungry, dispirited, quite unsuccessful, and here he resolved to eat and rest for the night.
He would have a meal, for by this time he was ravenous, and then go and talk in the bar or the tap about Bealby.