“Hi! The woman in gray!... It’s her!... Halt! Or I’ll fire!”
He crossed the road in one stride, jumped into the ploughed field on the other side of it, raced across it, and sideways up a slope to a farm. Then came another slope, then some fields; then he ran into a lane which skirted another farm and had a thick, quickset hedge on both sides of it.
He stopped short. He had outdistanced his heavily-booted pursuers considerably. He was out of their sight behind that thick hedge. In a jiffy he pulled off the hat, stripped off the frock, and thrust them well down into the bottom of the overgrown ditch. Then he put on his fisherman’s cap, lit a cigarette, stuck his hands in his pockets, and went back the way he had come.
At the corner of the farm two breathless, bucketting detectives nearly ran into him.
“Hullo, fisherman! Have you met a woman—a woman in gray?”
“Yes.... A woman who was running, you mean?... A regular madwoman,” said Ralph.
“That’s her!... Which way did she go?”
“She went into the farm.”
“How?”
“Through the back gate.”