Their feet crunched upon the gravel walk, and then sounded hollowly in the empty spaces of the porch. Scanlon pushed open a heavy door which admitted them to a great room with a low ceiling, beamed massively, and coloured as with smoke. The floor was sanded; a fire of pine logs roared up a wide-throated chimney; brass lamps, fixed in sockets in the walls, threw a warm yellowish glow upon polished pewter tankards and painted china plates. The tables and chairs were of oak, scrubbed white by much attentive labour; prim half curtains graced the small-paned windows.
A short man with a comfortable presence, a white apron and a red face came forward to greet them.
“Good-evening, Mr. Scanlon,” said he, cordially. “I’m pleased to see you, sir. I’d been told you’d given us up and gone off to the city.”
“Just for a breather, that’s all,” Scanlon informed him, as he and the crime specialist sat at a table near to the blazing hearth. It was still autumn, but there had been a dampness and a chill in the night air which made the snugness of the inn very comfortable.
The red-faced landlord smiled genially.
“I might have known that, even if the shooting is none too good, the bracing air would bring you back.”
Ashton-Kirk glanced about the public room. A small, cramped-looking man sat at a table with a draught board before him, studying a complex move of the pieces through a pair of thick-lensed glasses. A polished crutch stood at one side of his chair, and a heavy walking stick at the other. Deeply absorbed in the problem and its working out was another man, younger, but drawn-looking, who coughed and applied a handkerchief to his lips with great frequency.
The hearty looking landlord caught the glances of the crime specialist, and smiled.
“My customers are a fragile lot,” said he in a low voice. “The inns get only that kind in the winter,” as though in explanation, “and some of them are worse than these. It’s the air that does it.”
“Makes them ill?” smiled Ashton-Kirk.