After breakfast next morning Foster asked the hotel porter to take his knapsack to the station and get him a ticket to Carlisle.  He must leave a clew for Daly, who might come back to Hawick when he failed to find him in Annandale but would be badly puzzled if he went to Carlisle, because it was an important railway center, where one would have a choice of several different routes.  This would give Foster a few quiet days, after which he must think of a way of inducing Daly to resume the chase.  The latter probably thought he was following Lawrence, and if he did not, no doubt concluded that Foster was working in concert with him, and to find one would help him to deal with the other.

It was a dark morning and the smoke of the woolen factories hung about the town.  A few lights burned in the station, but the building was gloomy and Foster had some trouble in finding the porter among the waiting passengers.  Soon after he did so, the train came in and the man hurried along the platform, looking into the carriages.

“Ye wanted a corridor, sir,” he said as he opened a door.

Foster got in and stood at the window until the porter went away.  People were running up and down looking for places, but he had no time to lose.  Opening the door on the opposite side, he went along the corridor and stood for a moment on the step at the other end of the carriage.  He could not see the porter, and when two or three passengers ran up got down from the step.  Next moment the whistle blew, the engine snorted, and the train rolled out of the station.

As none of the porters spoke to him, Foster thought he had managed the thing neatly and made it look as if he had come to see somebody off instead of having been left behind.  For all that, he waited a minute or two, studying a time-table, to avoid the risk of overtaking the hotel porter; and then made his way by back streets out of the town.  For some miles, the road he took ran south up a well-cultivated valley, past turnip and stubble fields and smooth pasture; and then changed to a rough stony track that climbed a hill.

A turn shut in the valley when he reached higher ground, and a long stretch of moor rolled away ahead.  Foster thought these sharp transitions from intensive cultivation to the sterile wilds were characteristic of southern Scotland.  It had rained since he left Hawick, but now the sun shone down between the clouds and bright gleams and flying shadows chased each other across the waste.  To the south the sky was clear and shone with a lemon-yellow glow, against which the rounded hills rose, delicately gray.  In one place there was a gap that Foster thought was Liddesdale, and his path led across the latter towards the head of Tyne.  Not a house broke the sweep of withered grass and heath, and only the crying of plover that circled in the distance disturbed the silence.