THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
the granite-like surface which marks a roadman's foot-gear. Then I bit and scraped my finger-nails till the edges were all cracked and uneven. The men I was matched against would miss no detail. I broke one of the boot-laces and retied it in a clumsy knot and loosed the other so that my thick grey socks bulged over the uppers. Still no sign of anything on the road. The motor I had observed half hour ago must have gone home.
My toilet complete, I took up the barrow and began my journeys to and from the quarry a hundred yards off. I remembered an old scout in Rhodesia, who had done many queer things in his day, once telling me that the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it. You could never keep it up, he said, unless you could manage to convince yourself that you were it. So I shut off all other thoughts and switched them on the roadmending. I thought of the little white cottage as my home, I recalled the years I had spent herding on Leithen Water, I made my mind dwell lovingly on sleep in a box-bed and a
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