"Well, don't play the fool again," said Wulfrey shortly. "If your greed for other folk's goods hadn't blinded you, you would understand that a gentleman does not stoop to stealing."
"I've seen some I wouldn't trust further'n I could see 'em, and then only if their hands were up over their heads. But ye're not that kind, an' I was wrong. So there 'tis, an' no more to be said. What have ye found?"
"Pipes and tobacco. That is all I went for."
After his two days of enforced silence Macro was inclined to expand, but found his advances coldly received. Wulfrey's pride was in arms and the insult rankled.
By degrees, however, the storm-cloud drifted by, and matters between them became again much as they had been, with somewhat of added knowledge, on each side, of the character of the other.
The mate had learned that the Doctor, quiet as he might appear, was not a man to suffer injustice or to be meddled with. And Wulfrey had got a further warning of the possibilities of trouble should he and the mate come to serious differences.
It seemed absurd that two men, stranded, perhaps for life, on this bare sandbank, should be unable to live together in amity. Yet, his experience of men told him that it was just such enforced close intimacy—the constant rubbing together of very divergent natures, with nothing in common between them but the necessities entailed by their common misfortune—that might, nay almost certainly must, come to explosion at times, unless they both set themselves sedulously to the keeping of the peace.
If any actual rupture took place between them, he foresaw that the mate might develop phases of character which would be exceedingly awkward and difficult to deal with. Freedom from all the ordinary restraints which civilisation imposed upon the natural inner man might easily run to wildest licence.
At bottom this man was just a wild Highland cateran with a dash of Spanish buccaneer, hot-blooded, avid of gain under circumstances so propitious, insatiable. The chance of a lifetime had come to him and he was exultantly set on making the most of it. He was like a cage-bred wolf set down suddenly into the midst of an unprotected flock of sheep. There was his natural prey in profusion and there was none to stay him. To be dropped unexpectedly on to this enormous pile of plunder was like the realisation of a fairy tale. No wonder he was inclined to lose his head.
It was fortunate, thought Wulfrey, that they were built on different lines, and that the plunder-pile made absolutely no appeal to himself beyond the necessaries of life.