I nodded to Lindheim, “I think it is all right. But we will go in and see.”
He was sitting at a table by the window and filling his pipe as we entered. An Englishman, certainly, I thought, and of a type not uncommon. A darkish, sunburnt complexion, fearless blue-grey eyes, a drooping moustache, and perhaps a trifle too much heaviness in the jaw; the sort of man you see scores of in the West End during the summer months and very few in the winter, the type from which our best soldiers and sportsmen are drawn. He was dressed in a workmanlike if rather shabby shooting-suit, and his gun and cartridge-bag stood in the corner beside him.
On our appearance he looked up casually, and as his eye rested on me a slight beam of recognition came into it, such as one Englishman gives another when they meet abroad. I bowed, and we both seemed inclined to laugh.
“I think we are fellow-countrymen,” I said. “Englishmen are apt to meet in out-of-the-way places.”
“Ah, yes,” he replied with a slight drawl. “Last place I expected to run against one in. Nothing to see; all nature and no art, and the nature not quite on the tourist scale.”
“We are not exactly tourists.”
“You know this part of the world?”
“No. We have come over to try and get sport of some kind.”
“Good man! I’ve been blazing away for the last six or eight weeks. I’m shooting for a game shop in Carlzig. So much a head, with board and lodging and a decent cottage thrown in. Like our dealers’ moors in England, only they do you better at home; prices are higher. Will you join me, sport or profit? As it is I am in danger of forgetting my mother tongue. Haven’t heard the English language in all its native purity from any lips but my own for months.”
I said we should be glad to have a day with him. Charged as I was with suspicion of everyone I met, I could not bring myself to think this man was not genuine; so far as his nationality went, he certainly was.