I explained that I had been a miserable failure as a detective.
“You’ve done jolly well, I think,” said Davies. “If you had shouted when you first heard him we should know less still. And we’ve got a boot, which may come in useful. Anchor out all right? Let’s get below.”
We smoked and talked till the new flood, lapping softly round the _Dulcibella_, raised her without a jar.
Of course, I argued, there might be nothing in it. The visitor might have been a commonplace thief; an apparently deserted yacht was a tempting bait. Davies scouted this possibility from the first.
“They’re not like that in Germany,” he said. “In Holland, if you like, they’ll do anything. And I don’t like that turning out of the lantern to gain time, if we were away.”
Nor did I. In spite of my blundering in details, I welcomed the incident as the first concrete proof that the object of our quest was no mare’s nest. The next point was what was the visitor’s object? If to search, what would he have found?
“The charts, of course, with all our corrections and notes, and the log. They’d give us away,” was Davies’s instant conclusion. Not having his faith in the channel theory, I was lukewarm about his precious charts.
“After all, we’re doing nothing wrong, as you’ve often said yourself,” I said.
Still, as a true index to our mode of life they were the only things on board that could possibly compromise us or suggest that we were anything more than eccentric young Englishmen cruising for sport (witness the duck-guns) and pleasure. We had two sets of charts, German and English. The former we decided to use in practice, and to hide, together with the log, if occasion demanded. My diary, I resolved, should never leave my person. Then there were the naval books. Davies scanned them with a look I knew well.
“There are too many of them,” he said, in the tone of a cook fixing the fate of superfluous kittens. “Let’s throw them overboard. They’re very old anyhow, and I know them by heart.”
“Well, not here!” I protested, for he was laying greedy hands on the shelf; “they’ll be found at low water. In fact, I should leave them as they are. You had them when you were here before, and Dollmann knows you had them. If you return without them, it will look queer.” They were spared.