My cousin led me into the small deck house that served as his cabin when he was aboard. Through the windows we could see the afternoon gradually fading into evening, and the western sky turn crimson as we ploughed our way up winding sounds between the low-lying isles.

He produced a flask and a couple of bottles of soda water, lit his pipe, saw that door and windows were safely closed, and leaned over the table.

“Now,” said he, “how the devil did you get to this place? That’s the first question. They told me some yarn about a parachute, which I take it was really a hair net or a lobster pot⁠—”

“It wasn’t,” I interrupted, “it was a parachute and I landed in it. Do you mean to say you hadn’t heard of my disappearance in a runaway balloon?”

“What!” he exclaimed. “Are you the same Merton? I noticed the name of course, but do you mean to tell me they’re giving away R.N.V.R. commissions as promiscuously as all that?”

“They give ’em to the pick of young England’s manhood,” I assured him. “The idea is to make the Navy into a real live force, capable of originality and enterprise.”

He grinned.

“They’ve struck the originality all right,” he admitted, “but, Lord, the time that will be wasted court-martialling you fellows! However, let’s hear the whole yarn from the beginning.”

I began at the snapping of the cable and told him my adventures faithfully down to the moment when he unlocked my bedroom door. He only interrupted once or twice to get some point or other clear, and then when I had finished he leaned back and looked at me hard across the table.

“Roger,” he said, “I’ve known you long enough and well enough to know that you are not a deliberate liar, but I hope you’ll forgive my saying that this is a damned tough bullet to chew.”

“It sounds a tall order,” I admitted, “but it’s true.”

He filled his pipe thoughtfully.

“I may as well tell you,” he said in a moment, “that I am not at present a very credulous person. From the moment this blessed war began and I got this job, I have done little else than investigate spy legends, and I have come to the deliberate conclusion that there is either a lot more imagination in the world than anyone has ever dreamt of, or that mankind are chronic and inveterate liars. I haven’t yet had the luck to find one single true bill in any story I’ve investigated.”

“Your luck has turned now, Jack.”

“Possibly,” he said slowly, “and mind you, Roger, there’s no doubt whatever that a devilish secret service system exists; or that it’s being used against us for all it’s worth. Secret petrol bases for their submarines, secret signallying from the shore, mine-laying by so-called neutral ships; all that sort of thing is going on under our noses. I’ve got several very shrewd suspicions and hope to bring off one or two little discoveries not a thousand miles from this very spot. In fact, if you had pitched on any one of three or four other islands for the scene of your tale, or if what you’d seen had been just a little different I wouldn’t have questioned a word of your story. But Ransay is not one of the suspected islands, and your friend in oilskins doesn’t fit into anything I happen to have heard from other sources.”

“Look here,” I said, “what’s the good of being cousins if we aren’t candid? Do you or don’t you believe me?”

John Whiteclett looked at me very steadily and spoke in his most deliberate accents.

“I believe that you believe every word of it. But I know you’re an imaginative fellow and I can see for myself already that at least three quarters of your yarn can be explained away very easily.”

“Explain it.”

“Well, my dear fellow, just look at things for a moment from the point of view of a perfectly innocent and loyal inhabitant of Ransay⁠—the Rendalls for instance. You appear on their shores absolutely mysteriously in the dead of night, you admit yourself you lay yourself out to behave like a thinly disguised Hun⁠—d⁠⸺⁠d thinly too, apparently! You blow in from nowhere on the doctor and talk with a German accent. You blow in on the laird, begin talking with an accent and then drop it. You pitch him a cock and bull yarn about being landed from a cruiser and wanting to hide your uniform coat and so on. You conduct yourself like a criminal in church and wander out at night. Naturally the Rendalls⁠—and everybody else⁠—eye you strangely to your face and try to find out a little more behind your back. Do you see?”

“There’s something certainly in all this,” I had to admit.

“Then they find your parachute⁠—”

“Who found it?”

“I haven’t asked that yet; but I shall of course. Anyhow it was found, and as evidently you had hid it. One point discovered against you. Then the Rendalls decide on stronger measures⁠—and very rightly too, I think. They open your drawer and find you never had a uniform coat at all. Most wisely they then wire to me, and to keep you from bolting, lock you in your room.”

“Dash it,” said I, “I seem at least to have succeeded in providing them with a devilish good excuse for every blessed thing they did!”

“I don’t honestly think you have left yourself with any grounds whatever for suspecting the Rendalls of anything.”

“On the other hand, sending for you and having me arrested would be an excellent way of getting rid of me when they were certain who I was⁠—or rather, wasn’t.”

“And who did they make apparently certain you were not? A British officer! That was the natural conclusion when they opened that drawer. No, no, the Rendalls come out of it all right. Then let’s take the doctor. He looks at you suspiciously⁠—as well he might.”

“Before I spoke!” I interjected.

“And do you flatter yourself that your appearance, without a cap and in a buttoned-up oilskin on a fine day, was reassuring?”

“But the blind?”

“Did you never see a blind come down with a run by mistake? There’s a blind in my smoking room at home that comes down like that whenever you touch it. There’s nothing against the doctor either⁠—so far anyhow.”

“And his friend O’Brien?”

“Ah, that’s a different story. Mind you, you have shown me not a shred of evidence against the fellow. Still, what’s he doing there? That’s a thing I’m going to find out within the next four and twenty hours. But you can’t prove that he did anything, and you can’t suspect a man of treason just because you don’t like his looks. There are possibly prejudiced people who don’t like ours.”

“Wait till you see him.”

“I shall,” said my cousin with an emphasis that hardly seemed to mean what I meant. “As for the Scollay family⁠—nothing against them whatever, except that they live at a lonely spot on the shore, which I should say was rather their misfortune than their fault.”

“And the old boy on the road, who, Miss Rendall declared, doesn’t exist?”

“How long did you give her to run over all the inhabitants of the island? Did she look up a list of them, or a rent roll or anything?”

“No,” I admitted. “Still, she seemed very positive, and she lives in the place and must know everybody. If she fibbed, that’s certainly suspicious. If she was correct, then I met someone in disguise.”

“Well,” said he with an indulgent and extremely irritating smile, “I shall enquire about that old gentleman too. But, frankly, I’ve no doubt whatever that Miss Rendall simply forgot him when you asked her.”

“All the characters seem cleared except mine,” I remarked.

“Wait a bit, old chap. Now we’ll come to the really suspicious things that you actually did see. First, the man on the shore.”

“Can’t he be explained away?”

“Possibly,” said Jack imperturbably, “but he needs a good deal more explaining. You admit you became a bit lightheaded soon afterwards.”

“I’ve thought of that explanation myself, but it won’t wash when he or one of his friends went for me on the shore.”

“Are you dead certain anybody did try to go for you? You admit you saw nobody.”

“I saw that curved thing⁠—like a scimitar.”

“But who on earth would be using a scimitar in these islands? And what a futile way to use it⁠—jabbing down at you from overhead!”

“The point of it hit the rock hard enough.”

“You had only the sound to go by.”

“That’s all,” I admitted.

“And you heard that in the dark.” He shook his head, “My dear fellow! I know you are telling me honestly what you think happened, but to be quite frank⁠—”

He broke off and shook his head again.

“Well,” said I, “that’s explained away very happily. What I saw was only something else and what I heard was something else too. You put the alternatives so clearly, Jack, that one can’t help being convinced. And what about the shooting affair? I only heard a thingumabob and saw a what-you-may-call-it, I suppose?”

“My dear Roger, I only want to test the alternatives and see what can’t be explained away. Have you ever been under fire before?”

“No, but I’ve seen pictures of it in the illustrated papers.”

“Dash it, be serious!” said he. “You have no doubt whatever that somebody blazed either at you or at something else from behind that wall?”

“Or at something else? What do you mean?”

“There weren’t any duck about, or anything of that kind? I’ve known a wild shot blaze both barrels within six inches of my own head and explain he had never noticed me.”

“I was rather too preoccupied to notice whether there were any duck there when he began,” said I, “but unless they were deaf duck there certainly wouldn’t be any left after he’d loosed off his first bullet. Besides one doesn’t usually shoot duck with bullets.”

“One might with a rook rifle.”

“I admit that one might; also that a very excitable person might go on shooting after the duck had gone. But do you really mean to tell me, Jack, that that explanation satisfies you?”

“I don’t say that it does absolutely, and I quite admit that the weakness of my explanations is that your story requires three of them; none being perfectly satisfactory. However, it comes to this, that we have narrowed the field down to three incidents that want a bit of explanation. Everything else points as much one way as the other.”

“Which way?”

“To your being mistaken for a spy yourself.”

A horried thought struck me. It was so horrid that it took a little pluck to get it out.

“In that case, supposing some patriotic individual had tried first to stab and then to shoot me, for his country’s sake?”

“By Jove!” exclaimed my cousin and gazed thoughtfully into space for a bit. Then he said, “That’s possible, but it’s a tall order too; and it leaves out the man on the shore.”

I was visited by another horrid thought.

“He might have been spy hunting!”

“Well, in that case we can easily get on to his tracks. There will be no point in his denying it. But would the conversation fit that theory?”

I thought for a moment and then said with heartfelt relief,

“No, it couldn’t possibly.”

My cousin fell silent and stared into the thickening dusk. Then he looked round with a start and said,

“We’re nearly in.”

We both went out on deck and saw at the head of the bay before us houses and lights on shore and a church tower against the evening sky.

“Well, Roger,” said he, “I’ll go into this business very carefully and make the most thorough enquiry. Don’t think I’m not keen on getting at the bottom of it. You’ve got to get off at once and rejoin your ship of course?”

I said I must.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” he went on; “of course we’ve got to lie very low about this sort of thing, but I feel I owe you some account of what happens. I’ll write and let you know as soon as I have finished my investigation.”

John Whiteclett was the best of fellows, shrewd and levelheaded and a first class officer, but somehow or other I felt small confidence in his getting the better of the cunning foe on Ransay. However, it was all that could be done now. My own part was finished and I had to confess I had failed ignominiously.