While staying as a guest at Merridale Hall, Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond’s peaceful repose is disturbed by a young man who dashes into the house, begging for help. When two warders arrive seeking a notorious murderer who has escaped, Drummond assures them they are chasing the wrong man. But who on earth is the terrified youngster?

While staying as a guest at Merridale Hall, Captain Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond's peaceful repose is disturbed by a frantic young man who comes dashing into the house, trembling and begging for help. When two warders arrive, asking for a man named Morris - a notorious murderer who has escaped from Dartmoor - Drummond assures them that they are chasing the wrong man. In which case, who on earth is this terrified youngster?

While staying as a guest at Merridale Hall, Captain Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond's peaceful repose is disturbed by a frantic young man who comes dashing into the house, trembling and begging for help. When two warders arrive, asking for a man named Morris, a notorious murderer who has escaped from Dartmoor, Drummond assures them that they are chasing the wrong man. In which case, who on earth is this terrified youngster?

As yet it had not reached Merridale Hall, which stood on highish ground, some hundred yards from the main road to Yelverton, though already it was drifting sluggishly round the base of the little hill on which the house was built. Soon it would be covered: it would become a place cut off from the outside world, a temporary prison of stones and mortar whose occupants must perforce rely upon themselves. And it is possible that a dreamer standing at the smoking-room window, and gazing over the billowing landscape of cotton wool, might have pondered on the different dramas even then being enacted in all the other isolated dwellings. Strange stories of crime, of passion; tragedies of hate and love; queer figments of imagination would perhaps have passed in succession through his mind, always provided that the dreamer was deaf. For if possessed of normal hearing, the only possible idea that could have occupied his brain would have been how to preserve it.

Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond is a fictional character, created by H. C. McNeile and published under his pen name "Sapper". Following McNeile's death in 1937, the novels were continued by Gerard Fairlie. Drummond is a First World War veteran who, fed up with his sedate lifestyle, advertises looking for excitement, and becomes a gentleman adventurer. The character has appeared in novels, short stories, on the stage, in films, on radio and television, and in graphic novels. Drummond is a member of "the Breed", a class of Englishman who were patriotic, loyal and "physically and morally intrepid". This is the seventh Bulldog Drummond novel.