"'Bout ten to eleven."
"Hm! Think they'll shove any obstacles in the way?"
"Depends," said Anthony. "If they sent a message through it's pretty certain we may run into a hold up."
"Going to chance it?"
"No. We'll slip off the main road at Cobham and trickle in through the byes."
"Right oh! tell me when."
For some miles they drove in silence and once again between Ripley and Guildford had a glimpse of the following lights. With a considerable shock Barraclough realised that the distance separating the two cars had greatly diminished. But hereabouts an unexpected piece of luck favoured them. At a point where the road narrowed between hedges a farm gate was thrown open and a flock of sheep was driven out into the highway. Flora contrived to dash past before the leaders of the flock came through the gate. Another second and she would have been too late. Glancing back Anthony observed that the entire road was solid with sheep, a compact mass that moved neither forward nor backward.
"Our friends'll lose five minutes penetrating that," he announced gleefully.
It did not occur to him until later that every one of those woolly ewes was an unknowing servant of Hugo van Diest and that their presence in the road was the direct result of a wire dispatched to a quiet little man named Phillips who had been given the task of making the way into London difficult. Mr. Phillips had not had very much time, but he had done his best. A series of telegraph poles had been cut down outside Staines, Slough, and at various points along the Portsmouth road. A huge furniture van with its wheels off obstructed the narrows at Brentford, and in one or two places wires had been drawn across the King's highway.
It was the side turning at Cobham saved them running into one of these obstacles by a narrow margin of scarcely a hundred yards. Also it was the side turning, bumpy narrow and twisted that proved their undoing.