THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS
It was not that they looked different; they were different. I clung desperately to the words of Peter Pienaar.
Then something awoke me. The old man
laid down his hand to light a cigar. He
didn't pick it up at once, but sat back for a
moment in his chair, with his fingers tapping
on his knees.
It was the movement I remembered when I had stood before him in the moorland farm with the pistols of his servants behind me.
A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I didn't and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten o'clock.
The three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their secrets. The young one
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