Langdon St. Ives and Willis Pule: Pursuer and Adversary

Langdon St. Ives and Willis Pule are bound by a pursuit that keeps changing shape: a suspected theft becomes a chase along the River Nidd, a spacecraft accident becomes grounds for accusation, and a chance encounter on a train leaves each man anticipating the next move. Their conflict is not a simple contest between a hunter and a captured quarry. St. Ives’s certainty repeatedly outruns what he can establish, while Pule’s evasions are constrained by his dependence on Ignacio Narbondo and by the possibility that St. Ives will catch him again.

Identification and First Pursuit

St. Ives initially investigates a suspected intruder at his manor with a description in mind: a lean man with oily hair, a yellow shirt, and a leather coat. Hasbro corrects the picture. The man had been stout, with blondish curls. The detail triggers St. Ives’s recognition of the figure he had encountered with chemical-soaked bandages: Narbondo’s assistant, Willis Pule. He concludes that Narbondo sent Pule, and wonders how the doctor learned that St. Ives possessed the papers. The identification therefore joins the immediate break-in to a wider contest over scientific documents and Narbondo’s knowledge of St. Ives’s work.

St. Ives and Hasbro take rifles loaded with birdshot and follow Pule’s footprints northwest along the River Nidd. The trail ends at the water, where Pule appears to have swum across. A boatman ferries the pursuers to the opposite bank, but there are no footprints there. As dusk settles, St. Ives considers several explanations: Pule may have doubled back through the shallows, boarded one of the boats along the river, or had an accomplice waiting beyond the hill. The physical trail gives the pursuit a direction, but not a conclusion. St. Ives’s attention also shifts from the fugitive to Narbondo, whose possible presence makes the escape seem part of a larger threat.

The Spacecraft and the Public Manhunt

The spacecraft’s accidental launch intensifies St. Ives’s hostility. He watches it break free from the end of a rocket, travel over the men’s heads with its hatch open, and disappear beyond distant trees. A crash follows. His first response is fear that a manor house has been damaged or that people have been hurt; anger quickly replaces that fear. He imagines Pule as responsible, fires both rounds from his rifle at the moon, and decides that he will return to London to confront the villainy he believes he has uncovered. The sequence makes the rupture of St. Ives’s scientific project inseparable from his personal pursuit of Pule, even though the evidence presented here records his accusation as his own conclusion, not as a confirmed account of who launched the craft.

St. Ives then uses a local report of a violent, ragged stranger to turn villagers against the man they believe they are tracking. He urges them to use dogs, describes the supposed space traveler as a threat, and insists that he should be captured alive so science can study him. His performance is strategically useful: torch-bearing men gather, and St. Ives sees the crowd as a way to run Pule down. Yet he also becomes anxious that the wrecked spacecraft might contain identifying marks that expose his own connection to it. The public story casts Pule as an alien menace; privately, St. Ives is trying both to direct the hunt and to keep suspicion from settling on himself.

The aftermath adds another layer of evasion to their conflict. While Hasbro removes two corpses from the manor, St. Ives keeps a visitor occupied with questions and drink. He wants the bodies taken far down the river rather than buried on the grounds, reasoning that if they are found, their deaths will be blamed on Pule. At the same time, he hopes Hasbro can recover the spacecraft, which he treats as the lost product of years of work. His pursuit of Pule is thus entangled with the management of evidence: the fugitive becomes a convenient explanation for events St. Ives does not want connected to himself.

Pursuit on the Train

Pule’s perspective makes the imbalance between the two men especially clear. He boards a second-class train for London, hungry and in a poor mood, and hides behind a newspaper. When the train stops, he sees St. Ives and Hasbro climbing aboard. Pule has no weapons and considers escaping through the compartment window if the door opens. His thought that there will be another time conveys both his expectation of continuing conflict and his immediate need to avoid capture.

Pule is also anxious about returning to Narbondo without the papers. He recalls that extracting information from Bill Kraken had taken hours, and that liquor had proved more effective than torture in getting Kraken to disclose what he knew. Pule’s aside that he preferred torture complicates any picture of him as merely a frightened fugitive: he is an operative willing to use brutality, even while recognizing that Kraken’s information had been uncertain. Yet his conduct remains oriented toward Narbondo’s advantage. He considers leaving the train to ransack or burn St. Ives’s estate, then finds himself thrown back into his seat as the train lurches forward. When he checks the aisle and sees Hasbro speaking with St. Ives, he withdraws again. The missed opportunity frustrates him, but he concludes that Narbondo, as usual, would be the one to profit from his return to the manor.

An Unsettled Adversarial Bond

St. Ives later regards Pule’s escape from the train as another failure that demands redress. At a dinner where Parsons presses him about Birdlip’s returning craft, St. Ives is more concerned with finding Pule and beating him than with accepting the proposed scientific discussion. He says he will also search for the homunculus’s spacecraft, but distinguishes that search from what he most wants to do first. His irritation is sharpened by uncertainty: he considers that Pule may have jumped to his death, but finds the possibility unsatisfying because, in St. Ives’s view, villains should be made to answer for themselves.

The relationship is therefore driven by repeated interruption rather than resolution. St. Ives can identify Pule, follow his trail, and recruit a crowd to search for him, but he does not secure him in these episodes. Pule, meanwhile, evades the immediate encounter on the train but fails to return to the manor or obtain the papers. St. Ives’s pursuit carries a genuine scientific and practical grievance—the lost spacecraft and missing documents—yet it is also marked by personal anger, self-protective misdirection, and a desire for public accountability. Pule’s evasions keep that pursuit active, while his allegiance to Narbondo prevents the contest from being only a private rivalry between the two men.