The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes

she realized something was happening to the mist.
    The mist was parting in a new way. Instead of rifts and pockets there were drifting tunnels of visibility. Where there hung at one moment a mere wall of vapour she was looking the next down an evanescent vaulted aisle at some prospect infinitely remote. And somewhere still there were fleeting patches of sunlight, and when such a tunnel opened on one of these it was like a lighted room at the end of an uncertain corridor. It was thus that, hard to her left, she saw the railway line.
    Momentarily a watery sun had gleamed on the metals. She realized that the sense of infinite vista was a trick of the atmosphere and that these odd little tunnels did not in reality stretch far. The line was less than half a mile away, over there and below on her left.
    She had been climbing steadily and was not surprised to be thus looking down. But the direction was disturbing and she glanced at the compass. The line had somehow contrived to swing itself to the north. She turned round, uneasily aware that the mist was once more thinning dangerously about her. What she saw made her catch her breath. The trick of tunnel-like vista had repeated itself to the south. And there, too, the steel track gleamed. What was before her must be a bold curve of line formed by the railway’s skirting the shoulder of high ground on which she stood, and near the centre of this loop must be the spot where she had seen the smoke.
    The voices behind her were louder and she saw that a crisis had come. Were this treacherous mist to lift again as it threatened she might well be effectively trapped – trapped between the curve of steel which lay before her and the line of hunters who were closing in behind. For the first time she realized fully the significance of a railway line over such country as this. Unlike the undulating and heather-covered moor it was something which, granted any sort of visibility at all, it would be virtually impossible to cross unobserved. And where a straight line might give scope for manoeuvre this half-circle of track was like a pair of open jaws.
    Sheila looked up at the sky, trying to tell what the elements were preparing behind this shifting curtain of vapour. Though there was sunlight somewhere and the mist was lifting the day darkened steadily the while; she pictured leaden storm-clouds gathering invisible overhead; it occurred to her that something like a cloudburst might save her even now. The voices were less than a hundred yards away. She could distinguish that each spoke in order regularly up and down a line. Suddenly one of the voices spoke out of turn and loudly. Silence fell.
    It was like a calculated trick in some war of nerves. Sheila dropped to the heather, trembling. But she still had the final resource of the little gun. She would go forward still, but at a crawl; she would go forward and take her chance of breaking across the arc of steel…
    She had almost cried out. For from directly in front of her as she crawled a hare had started from its form. It vanished and – hideously – she felt the need to cry out still. She lay motionless. She bit the heather, knowing hysteria. Her lips opened, as if compelled. And then, instead of a cry in air, words formed themselves silently deep in her mind. Helpless harried hares. Helpless harried hares. She spoke them to herself again and again, fighting to control her nerves. Helpless harried hares. Snares. Lairs. A nice-minded poem by one of the Georgians. Philip Ploss – that was it. A comfortable man, sitting somewhere now with a morning glass of sherry in the sun. The hell he knew. Hopeless married mares, Sheila said to herself – and was again calm.
    The mist was withdrawing – rapidly, like scene-shifters hurrying into the wings after setting the stage for a tempest. There were black clouds above, and a single ray of sunlight shot upwards through them like a sword. Sheila saw the railway line; it ran, as she had supposed, in