There was
a protest of wings as the boy seized the last arriving messenger.
"Give it here!" Buchanan ordered.
The boy handed over a thin tube of paper which he had unfastened from
the bird's leg. Buchanan unrolled it and showed it to me. I read:
"Midland Federation. Axe United, Macclesfield Town. Match abandoned
after half-hour's play owing to fog. Three forty-five."
"Three forty-five," said Buchanan, looking at his watch. "He's done the
ten miles in half an hour, roughly. Not bad. First time we tried pigeons
from as far off as Axe. Here, boy!" And he restored the paper to the
boy, who gave it to another boy, who departed with it.
"Man," said the doctor, eyeing Buchanan. "Ye'd no business out here.
Ye're not precisely a pigeon."
Down we went, one after another, by the ladder, and now we fell into the
composing-room, where Buchanan said he felt warmer. An immense, dirty,
white-washed apartment crowded with linotypes and other machines, in
front of which sat men in white aprons, tapping, tapping--gazing at
documents pinned at the level of their eyes--and tapping, tapping. A
kind of cavernous retreat in which monstrous iron growths rose out of
the floor and were met half-way by electric flowers that had their roots
in the ceiling! In this jungle there was scarcely room for us to walk.
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