SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series. Buchan John

e/>

       John Buchan

      SIR EDWARD LEITHEN'S MYSTERIES - Complete Series

      The Power-House, John Macnab, The Dancing Floor, The Gap in the Curtain, Sick Heart River & Sing a Song of Sixpence

      Published by

      Books

      - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

       [email protected]

      2017 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-7583-349-5

      Table of Contents

       Novels

       The Power-House

       John Macnab

       The Dancing Floor, or The Goddess from the Shades

       The Gap in the Curtain

       Sick Heart River, or Mountain Meadow

       Sing a Song of Sixpence: Sir Edward Leithen's Story

       Autobiography & Biography of John Buchan

       Memory Hold-the-door

       Unforgettable, Unforgotten by Anna Masterton Buchan

      NOVELS

       Table of Contents

      THE POWER-HOUSE

       Table of Contents

Table of Contents

       DEDICATION

       PREFACE BY THE EDITOR

       I. BEGINNING OF THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE

       II. I FIRST HEAR OF MR ANDREW LUMLEY

       III. TELLS OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT

       IV. I FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF THE SUPER-BUTLER

       V. I TAKE A PARTNER

       VI. THE RESTAURANT IN ANTIOCH STREET

       VII. I FIND SANCTUARY

       VIII. THE POWER-HOUSE

       IX. RETURN OF THE WILD GEESE

      DEDICATION

       Table of Contents

      TO MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B.

      My Dear General,

      A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that uneasy region have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the war, in the hope that it may enable an honest man here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities, I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.

      J.B.

      PREFACE BY THE EDITOR

       Table of Contents

      We were at Glenaicill—six of us—for the duck-shooting, when Leithen told us this story. Since five in the morning we had been out on the skerries, and had been blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A vast nondescript meal, luncheon and dinner in one, had occupied us till the last daylight departed, and we settled ourselves in the smoking-room for a sleepy evening of talk and tobacco.

      Conversation, I remember, turned on some of Jim’s trophies which grinned at us from the firelit walls, and we began to spin hunting yarns. Then Hoppy Bynge, who was killed next year on the Bramaputra, told us some queer things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz, and lived for six months in mud. Jim said he couldn’t abide mud— anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. (He was to get enough of it last winter in the Ypres Salient.) You know how one tale begets another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for five of us had been a good deal about the world.

      All except Leithen, the man who was afterwards Solicitor- General, and, they say, will get to the Woolsack in time. I don’t suppose he had ever been farther from home than Monte Carlo, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.

      Jim had just finished a fairly steep yarn about his experiences on a Boundary Commission near Lake Chad, and Leithen got up to find a drink.

      “Lucky devils,” he said. “You’ve had all the fun out of life. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school.”

      I said something about his having all the honour and glory.

      “All the same,” he went on, “I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ you know.”

      Then he told us this story. The version I give is one he afterwards wrote down, when he had looked up his diary for some of the details.

      I.