I woke to find Wake in a thundering bad temper. The thing he remembered most about the night before was our scrap and the gross way I had insulted him. I didn’t blame him, for if any man had taken me for a German spy I would have been out for his blood, and it was no good explaining that he had given me grounds for suspicion. He was as touchy about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age. I was feeling rather extra buckish myself and that didn’t improve matters. His face was like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to bathe, so I held my tongue. He was chewing the cud of his wounded pride.
But the salt water cleared out the dregs of his distemper. You couldn’t be peevish swimming in that jolly, shining sea. We raced each other away beyond the inlet to the outer water, which a brisk morning breeze was curling. Then back to a promontory of heather, where the first beams of the sun coming over the Coolin dried our skins. He sat hunched up staring at the mountains while I prospected the rocks at the edge. Out in the Minch two destroyers were hurrying southward, and I wondered where in that waste of blue was the craft which had come here in the night watches.
I found the spoor of the man from the sea quite fresh on a patch of gravel above the tide-mark.
“There’s our friend of the night,” I said.
“I believe the whole thing was a whimsy,” said Wake, his eyes on the chimneys of Sgurr Dearg. “They were only two natives—poachers, perhaps, or tinkers.”
“They don’t speak German in these parts.”
“It was Gaelic probably.”
“What do you make of this, then?” and I quoted the stuff about birds with which they had greeted each other.
Wake looked interested. “That’s Uber allen Gipfeln. Have you ever read Goethe?”
“Never a word. And what do you make of that?” I pointed to a flat rock below tide-mark covered with a tangle of seaweed. It was of a softer stone than the hard stuff in the hills and somebody had scraped off half the seaweed and a slice of the side. “That wasn’t done yesterday morning, for I had my bath here.”