The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan

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Title: The Thirty-nine Steps

Author: John Buchan

Posting Date: July 30, 2008 [EBook #558]
Release Date: June, 1996

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS ***

Produced by Jo Churcher. HTML version by Al Haines.

THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

by

JOHN BUCHAN

TO

THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON

(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)

My Dear Tommy,

You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of
tale which Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the
'shocker'--the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and
march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last
winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and was
driven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and
I should like to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship,
in the days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than
the facts.

J.B.

CONTENTS

1. The Man Who Died
2. The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels
3. The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper
4. The Adventure of the Radical Candidate
5. The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman
6. The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist
7. The Dry-Fly Fisherman
8. The Coming of the Black Stone
9. The Thirty-Nine Steps
10. Various Parties Converging on the Sea

CHAPTER ONE

The Man Who Died

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon
pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old
Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that
I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but
there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the
ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and
the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been
standing in the sun. 'Richard Hannay,' I kept telling myself, 'you
have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.'

It made me bite my lips to think of