shifty

Subject to frequent changes in direction.

Off he raced, shuffling his bare feet through the hot, dry, shifty sand.

The Helfrich plan is simple and direct, based upon a minute knowledge of Indies waters: to strike & strike again & again at the Japanese supply lines. For most of his naval life, Java-born Admiral Helfrich has done nothing but study war with the Japanese. His Navy was designed for shifty, aggressive action within the narrow East Indian waters. In the first 54 days of war his ships and cooperating Dutch planes sank 54 Japanese vessels. "Ship-a-day Helfrich," the Dutch soon called him. His ideas dominated the enlarging and equipping of Java's main naval base at Surabaya, where heavy cruisers (but not battleships) can be fueled and repaired. For the Helfrich plan to succeed, Surabaya must be held.

Moving from one object to another; not looking directly and steadily at the person with whom one is speaking.

1886, George Manville Fenn, This Man’s Wife, Chapter 3, in Littel’s Living Age, Volume 168, No. 2178, 20 March, 1886, p. 761, […] his quick, shifty eyes turned from the manager to the lethal weapons over the chimney, then to the safe, then to the bank, and Mr. Thickens’s back.

His tinted glasses were not really opaque, but of a blue kind common enough, nor were the eyes behind them shifty, but regarded me steadily.

Having the appearance of being dishonest, criminal, or unreliable.

He was a shifty character in a seedy bar, and I checked my wallet was still there after talking to him.

‘I don’t trust him,’ he goes on. ‘He is shifty. He is like a jackal sniffing around, looking for mischief. […]’

Resourceful; full of, or ready with, shifts or expedients.

Shifty and thrifty as old Greek or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure.