What chance has a man who looks like a cattle-dealer against these
experts, especially when he is only in action for a week and starts with
the assumption that the few invaluable facts given him are mostly works
of imagination? Possibly he may have fluked upon the remedy by removing
O'Brien, and if the island of Ransay gives no more trouble for the rest
of this war, it will certainly look as though he had. But in that case he
will have been uncommon lucky, because he seems to me to have overlooked
or dismissed practically everything significant.
Take, for instance, the actual words used by my oilskinned friend. They
most distinctly implied that he was living on shore. Take the incident of
the blind, which may perhaps have been, as John Whiteclett says, an
every-day accident, but which certainly happened in the house where the
one man they do suspect was living, and would certainly involve the
doctor if it were not a mere accident. Look at my security while I was
humbugging them by my suspicious conduct, and then the unscrupulous and
quickly repeated attempts to get rid of me after two things had
happened--my dropping of my accent at the Rendalls and the discovery of
the parachute. Take that night on the shore when Miss Rendall escorted me
armed with a pistol and her father joined her at the very place and the
very time when the attack was made on me.
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