"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot." It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.
The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry—an extremity, he was to understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd best keep handy.
The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever." There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested at last.
He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The only sounds abroad were the shrill keep, keep, of the sea-pie, and a swish of wings out of the cliff.
Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place—scene of many a wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland, among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.
The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when, the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and heather-purple.
Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping along on hands and knees.
The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge, staring into the murk beneath him.
A mere gulf of shadow.
No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order, clear again in his head.