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.
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