This wandering about I considered necessary in order to delay and perhaps bamboozle any police dog put on my track. I had no doubt that these two men were policemen and that they had only just caught a glimpse of me which had made them curious. I am certain I again had to thank my whitish suit for my immunity from determined pursuit.
After this little excitement I had to move very rapidly as it was already nearly daylight, and I wished to get to the banks of the next river before hiding.
Pushing along the road I struck a small town, and crossed the end of it, taking a level crossing on the way. Seeing nobody at the station near-by I gained more confidence again, and was not so upset as I might have been when I found that I had to walk for a mile or more along a road flanked on both sides with houses.
At last and by no means too soon I got to the river bank, had a drink, refilled my water-bottle and set about looking for a hiding-place in which to sleep during the day. This river, the Leine, is about seventy yards broad and is deep and fairly sluggish. There was a bridge crossing it about a mile downstream from the place at which I drank.
I found a hiding-place not far from the river, but after a short while I began to think that it was a bad one, as although in this district most of the hay had been cut, one field quite near had still to be done. So off I went to look for a better place. I found a thick hedge which looked likely, and then suddenly saw a girl bathing eighty yards away. However, I quickly decided that she could never have seen me, and began to pull aside some brambles with a view to getting in. Suddenly without any warning I heard just behind me "Guten Morgen." I turned in a second and found myself face to face with a flapper dressed all in white, on her way to bathe.
I growled back "Good Morning" and she passed on. I expect she also got a shock, for I must have been a wild-looking object. I decided now that this was no place for me and began to make tracks as soon as she had moved away. I hadn't gone a hundred yards when I heard a man's voice and the yapping of a dog come from where I had spoken to the flapper. He was speaking to the girls, so fearing that my girl might have mentioned seeing an extraordinary apparition on her way, and so arouse suspicions in the mind of the man, I cleared out and went through the woods, which were fairly thick here for about a mile.