I did the best thing I could think of in the circumstances.  My seat was close to the steps which led to the other part of the inn.  I grabbed my hat, darted up them, and before they realized what I was doing had bolted the door behind me.  I could hear pandemonium break loose in the bar.

I slipped down a dark passage to another which ran at right angles to it, and which seemed to connect the street door of the inn itself with the back premises.  I could hear voices in the little hall, and that stopped me short.

One of them was Linklater’s, but he was not talking as Linklater had talked.  He was speaking educated English.  I heard another with a Scots accent, which I took to be the landlord’s, and a third which sounded like some superior sort of constable’s, very prompt and official.  I heard one phrase, too, from Linklater—­’He calls himself McCaskie.’  Then they stopped, for the turmoil from the bar had reached the front door.  The Fusilier and his friends were looking for me by the other entrance.

The attention of the men in the hall was distracted, and that gave me a chance.  There was nothing for it but the back door.  I slipped through it into a courtyard and almost tumbled over a tub of water.  I planted the thing so that anyone coming that way would fall over it.  A door led me into an empty stable, and from that into a lane.  It was all absurdly easy, but as I started down the lane I heard a mighty row and the sound of angry voices.  Someone had gone into the tub and I hoped it was Linklater.  I had taken a liking to the Fusilier jock.

There was the beginning of a moon somewhere, but that lane was very dark.  I ran to the left, for on the right it looked like a cul-de-sac.  This brought me into a quiet road of two-storied cottages which showed at one end the lights of a street.  So I took the other way, for I wasn’t going to have the whole population of Muirtown on the hue-and-cry after me.  I came into a country lane, and I also came into the van of the pursuit, which must have taken a short cut.  They shouted when they saw me, but I had a small start, and legged it down that road in the belief that I was making for open country.

That was where I was wrong.  The road took me round to the other side of the town, and just when I was beginning to think I had a fair chance I saw before me the lights of a signal-box and a little to the left of it the lights of the station.  In half an hour’s time the Edinburgh train would be leaving, but I had made that impossible.  Behind me I could hear the pursuers, giving tongue like hound puppies, for they had attracted some pretty drunken gentlemen to their party.  I was badly puzzled where to turn, when I noticed outside the station a long line of blurred lights, which could only mean a train with the carriage blinds down.  It had an engine attached and seemed to be waiting for the addition of a couple of trucks to start.  It was a wild chance, but the only one I saw.  I scrambled across a piece of waste ground, climbed an embankment and found myself on the metals.  I ducked under the couplings and got on the far side of the train, away from the enemy.