Now Carstairs was a plain honest-to-God Englishman from the New Forest, the very incarnation of the soldier from the English shires whose sheer lack of imagination and consequent inability to accept defeat in any circumstances clear broke the German spirit in the war. There was no associating that good-humoured face, that big mouth and button nose, with the idle fears of an overheated imagination. There are some people—I am one—who, even though they see nothing, have the faculty of detecting the presence of human beings in their vicinity. I recalled the eerie sensation I myself had had on landing but, of course, above all I thought of that bowed figure which the lightning had shown me standing by the grave in the clearing.
I was filled with the deepest foreboding. If there were people on the island, surely they must have remarked the arrival of the Naomi. Would they not have announced themselves to us? What object could they have, supposing Carstairs was not mistaken, in slinking round the camp?
Well, it was no part of my plans as yet to communicate my fears to Carstairs. So I rallied him gently.
But Carstairs stuck to his guns.
"It come over me so strong w'en you and the guv'nor was away this evening," Carstairs said, "that no less than four times I left my cook-pots to have a look round...."
"Well, and did you see anybody?"
"Not a blessed soul!"
"Did you hear anything?"
"No, sir!"
Yet the man was not to be shaken.