‘Member of what? I’ve got to get on. Let me by.’
‘Where are you bound for?’
‘What’s that to you?’ He pushed past and plunged downhill on to the moor, but the questioner was not to be put off so easily. He ran after him and caught up with him. The man turned on him like an angry cat. ‘Let me be! Get lost!’ he said hoarsely.
‘I can’t let you be, brother .You’d be on my conscience. Look, you’re down on your luck. I can see that. Come back with me to the hostel and I’ll get you a bed. A mate of mine can’t come and I’ve got his membership ticket as well as my own. You can be him, so far as the hostel will know. The Lord will forgive me the bit of cheating, as it’s in a good cause. Come on back with me. I’ll see you through. Got any money?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think you have, but the bed is paid for. We have to book and pay in advance. On the road, are you?’ All this time the earnest young man had remained with a sinewy hand grasping the wanderer’s sleeve. The unkempt man ceased to resist. ‘Would they really give me a bed?’ he asked.
‘Sure, if I show them the card. Your name’s Bert Leeds for tonight. Got it? Bert Leeds. That’s who you are, and you have to leave before ten in the morning. Now I don’t ask any questions, so you don’t need to tell me any lies. I want to be your friend, brother, that’s all. You see, I believe we were put into this sinful world to help each other, so I’m going to help you. Just between ourselves, what’s your name? I want to pray for you.’
‘I don’t have a name and prayers won’t do me any good.’
‘Oh, well, brother, if that’s the way you want it, I won’t press you. Where are you making for?’
‘I’ve got to get to Gledge End, so let me get on.’
‘You’ll never make it across the moor tonight. You look to me like you’ve got a weak chest. You come on back with me, brother. I’m not going to have your death on my conscience.’
‘What did you say my name was?’
‘Bert Leeds. All I have to do is hand in the cards and collect them up again when we leave.’
‘I’ll have to leave early.’
‘That’s all right. You leave as early as you like.’ The other young man came up to them. ‘Oh, hullo, Tony,’ said the Good Samaritan. ‘Are they open?’
‘They are, Steve, they are.’
The bedraggled man licked his lips.
‘I haven’t heard those blessed words since I don’t know when, ’ he said. The young men laughed.
‘Not that kind of open, brother,’ said his rescuer. ‘We’re strictly T.T. Come on, and I’ll stake you to a tin of beans.’
The four young women found that the walk through the woods was not an unqualified success. It was extremely wet underfoot after the rain, the trees dripped relentlessly on to the walkers who had a tendency to keep glancing from side to side in a wary, in fact nervous, manner, and at the end of a mile Tamsin’s ankle was beginning to feel the strain of coping with slippery mud and the heaps of sodden, fallen leaves.
With the help of Erica’s walking-stick as well as her own, she managed to get back to the carpark and the reception room, where Erica commanded her to sit and rest while she herself brought the car across the clearing.
‘I was looking at the notice-board while you were gone,’ said Isobel, when they had got themselves and Tamsin into the car.
‘There are some folk-dancers coming to give a show in a church hall at Gledge End on Saturday afternoon. The warden here has tickets. Shall we go?’
‘How much are the tickets?’ asked Erica.
‘Fifty pence and downwards, Mistress Shylock.’
‘For that dirty crack I shall treat you all, so there!’
The Youth Hostel was a popular one, but, so late in the holiday season, it was not full. Steve handed in the three tickets and he and Tony were soon making use of one of the calor gas cookers to heat up baked beans and fry the sausages they had bought at the hostel shop. Their guest ate his share, but remained taciturn. He did, however, insist upon doing the washing-up unassisted. After that, he asked where his bed was, so Steve showed him a large dormitory crowded with bunk beds, and he said he would turn in. The other two went into Long Cove Bay, the fishing village near by, to take a look at the sea, but by nine o’clock they, too, were in their bunks, and the hostel locked its doors at ten.
The warden did not live on the premises, but had what had been the lodge when the big Victorian house had been a private residence. She came over at seven in the morning to hand out the after-breakfast chores of cleaning and tidying-up which the hostellers were pledged to carry out before they left and to hand back membership tickets to those who were checking-out.
There was no sign of their overnight guest when Steve and Tony turned out of their bunks at eight. Steve applied to the warden.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I expect he’s the energetic sort. He must have gone out before I came over. His name is Leeds, you say? Well, he certainly hasn’t checked out because his membership card is still here.’
‘He’ll have to get his own breakfast, then, when he gets back,’ said Tony. ‘One thing, it’s only tea and cereal and baps and that pot of marmalade we bought here at the shop last night.’
They prepared their own breakfast and ate without talking. At nine they had performed the tasks allotted them by the warden but they still hung on without, at first, sharing the thought which was in both their minds.
At a quarter to ten the warden said brightly, ‘Well, you two are quite the last. You know I have to close the hostel at ten, don’t you? I should think your friend has decided to go on ahead of you.’
‘Well, we can’t wait any longer for him,’ said Steve. He collected the three tickets and he and Tony went out to the vestibule where all outdoor boots and shoes had to be left so that mud was not brought into the public rooms. ‘He’s cut his stick, I reckon,’ he added to Tony when they were out of earshot of the warden.
He had not only left the hostel, they discovered. He had taken Steve’s anorak and rucksack with him. Steve was too godly a young man to swear. Instead, his eyes filled with tears of self-pity and disappointment.
‘And I helped him and I trusted him,’ he said. ‘I called him brother. I was a Good Samaritan unto him. Our iron rations of biscuits and chocolate were in that rucksack, as well as all my spares.’
He could say no more at the time, for the warden came out after them. She still spoke brightly.
‘Oh, well, if you’re off, I can lock up now,’ she said. ‘I hope you catch up with your friend, but I daresay he’s on his way back here by now to join you unless he’s run into the escaped convict.’
‘Escaped convict?’ said Tony.
‘Why, yes. Didn’t you see the notice I put in the common-room? It was for the benefit of the girls mostly. You boys can always take care of yourselves, can’t you? Yes, I had a police warning. A convicted murderer has escaped from the Hangmoor gaol and is thought to be on the moors.’
The two young men looked at one another.
‘Thanks for telling us,’ said Tony. As they tramped down the lane towards the coast-road he said to Steve, ‘What do you think? Was he? He could be, I suppose.’
‘Whether he was or not, he’s a dirty dodder,’ said Steve morosely.
‘You mean an artful dodger, old man.’
‘No, I don’t. I mean a dirty dodder.’
‘What’s a dodder?’
‘It’s a plant. My botany book says it’s a vampire. It feeds solely on the sap of other plants, just as a vampire lives by sucking other people’s blood. Besides, if this dodder of ours is a murderer, he must have sucked somebody’s blood.’
‘Oh, hang it all, you can’t write him off like that. You only thought he was a tramp down on his luck, and I daresay that’s all he was, you know.’