I handed it back.  ’It’s either German or Dutch.  I’m not much of a scholar, barring a little French and the Latin I got at Heriot’s Hospital . . .  This is an awful slow train, Mr Linklater.’

The soldiers were playing nap, and the bagman proposed a game of cards.  I remembered in time that I was an elder in the Nethergate U.F.  Church and refused with some asperity.  After that I shut my eyes again, for I wanted to think out this new phenomenon.

The fellow knew German—­that was clear.  He had also been seen in Gresson’s company.  I didn’t believe he suspected me, though I suspected him profoundly.  It was my business to keep strictly to my part and give him no cause to doubt me.  He was clearly practising his own part on me, and I must appear to take him literally on his professions.  So, presently, I woke up and engaged him in a disputatious conversation about the morality of selling strong liquors.  He responded readily, and put the case for alcohol with much point and vehemence.  The discussion interested the soldiers, and one of them, to show he was on Linklater’s side, produced a flask and offered him a drink.  I concluded by observing morosely that the bagman had been a better man when he peddled books for Alexander Matheson, and that put the closure on the business.

That train was a record.  It stopped at every station, and in the afternoon it simply got tired and sat down in the middle of a moor and reflected for an hour.  I stuck my head out of the window now and then, and smelt the rooty fragrance of bogs, and when we halted on a bridge I watched the trout in the pools of the brown river.  Then I slept and smoked alternately, and began to get furiously hungry.

Once I woke to hear the soldiers discussing the war.  There was an argument between a lance-corporal in the Camerons and a sapper private about some trivial incident on the Somme.

‘I tell ye I was there,’ said the Cameron.  ‘We were relievin’ the Black Watch, and Fritz was shelling the road, and we didna get up to the line till one o’clock in the mornin’.  Frae Frickout Circus to the south end o’ the High Wood is every bit o’ five mile.’

‘Not abune three,’ said the sapper dogmatically.

‘Man, I’ve trampit it.’

‘Same here.  I took up wire every nicht for a week.’

The Cameron looked moodily round the company.  ’I wish there was anither man here that kent the place.  He wad bear me out.  These boys are no good, for they didna join till later.  I tell ye it’s five mile.’

‘Three,’ said the sapper.

Tempers were rising, for each of the disputants felt his veracity assailed.  It was too hot for a quarrel and I was so drowsy that I was heedless.

‘Shut up, you fools,’ I said.  ’The distance is six kilometres, so you’re both wrong.’

My tone was so familiar to the men that it stopped the wrangle, but it was not the tone of a publisher’s traveller.  Mr Linklater cocked his ears.