Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/207

 CHAPTER X

VARIOUS PARTIES CONVERGING ON THE SEA

PINK and blue June morning found me at Bradgate looking from the Griffin Hotel over a smooth sea to the lightship on the Cock sands which seemed the size of a bell-buoy. A couple of miles further south and much nearer the shore a small destroyer was anchored. Scaife, MacGillivray's man, who had been in the navy, knew the boat and told me her name and her commander's, so I sent off a wire to Sir Walter.

After breakfast Scaife got from a house-agent a key for the gates of the staircases on the Ruff. I walked with him along the sands, and sat down in a nook of the cliffs while he investigated the half dozen of them. I didn't want to be seen, but the place at this hour was quite deserted, and all the time I was on that beach I saw nothing but the sea-gulls. 202