![[Illustration]](https://oldbook.b-cdn.net/kitaplar/1/pg558-h/images/cover.jpg)
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
Contents
| Chapter I | The Man Who Died |
| Chapter II | The Milkman Sets Out on his Travels |
| Chapter III | The Adventure of the Literary Innkeeper |
| Chapter IV | The Adventure of the Radical Candidate |
| Chapter V | The Adventure of the Spectacled Roadman |
| Chapter VI | The Adventure of the Bald Archaeologist |
| Chapter VII | The Dry-Fly Fisherman |
| Chapter VIII | The Coming of the Black Stone |
| Chapter IX | The Thirty-Nine Steps |
| Chapter X | Various Parties Converging on the Sea |
TO
THOMAS ARTHUR NELSON
(LOTHIAN AND BORDER HORSE)
My Dear Tommy,
You and I have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of talewhich Americans call the “dime novel” and which we know as the“shocker”—the romance where the incidents defy theprobabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During anillness last winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, and wasdriven to write one for myself. This little volume is the result, and I shouldlike to put your name on it in memory of our long friendship, in the days whenthe wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the facts.
J.B.
Sept. 1915
Chapter I.
The Man Who Died
I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon prettywell disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and wasfed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feelinglike that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weathermade me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick. Icouldn’t get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flatas soda-water that has been standing in the sun. “Richard Hannay,”I kept telling myself, “you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, andyou had better climb out.”
It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building up those lastyears in Buluwayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but goodenough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. Myfather had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never beenhome since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted onstopping there for the rest of my days.
But from the first I was disappointed with it. In about a week I was tired ofseeing sights, and in less than a month I had had enough of restaurants andtheatres and race-meetings. I had no real pal to go about with, which probablyexplains things. Plenty of people invited me to their houses, but theydidn’t seem much interested in me. They would f