rny undergrowth, which
lined the eastern wall of the Inlet, and made his way around its
devious curvings, silently and slowly. The growth on the cliffs was so
dense in places that he had to crawl. The heat pressed down upon the
heavy moist foliage, and drained him like a steam-room. He had wobbled
from weakness and the heat in the saddle, even on the breezy highway.
Again and again, he halted with shut eyes until his reeling senses
righted. The thousand yards from the mouth of the cove to the moorings
of the _Savonarola_ wound like a Malay _creese_ with an interrogation
point for a handle. The distance consumed an hour, and much of the
vitality he had summoned by sheer force of will. He lay panting at last
in the smothering thicket, thirty feet from the rear-deck of the
_Savonarola_. Yet there was a laugh in his mind. It was altogether
outlandish, when he considered his small personal interest in such an
affair.... He thought of the listening eyes of Beth Truba--had he told
her of such an adventure of his boyhood.... And he thought of the
clever and intrepid Adith Mallory, and what she had meant by the last
added line of her letter, "I know what you can do."

Someone was already aboard, for the cabin-door was open. The sliding
hatch connected with the thick upright door, so that a single lock
sufficed for the cabin, which opened from the aft-deck. The still, deep
water of the cove drew Bedient's eyes constantly, and kept alive the
thought of his terrible thirst. The words of old Monkhouse repeated
often in his brain, "Ah, 'tis deep fathims under the _Savonarola_." He
slipped a little steel key from the ring, smiling because it was the
key to one of the Carreras cabinets at the _hacienda_, and placed it in
his mouth. He had done the same with a nail when in the small boat with
Carreras, the only boat that reached shore from the _Truxton_. It
started the saliva.

There was but one man in the cabin so far, as Bedient ascertained
through the ports,--a Chinese, and he was sweeping industriously. Miss
Mallory's idea that he steal in, while the boat was being provisioned,
seemed a far chance. He might have boarded the craft now, and surprised
the oriental in the cabin, but he had no grudge against him, and Rey's
Chinese were not purchasable. He thought of the forlorn last chance--to
creep back to the mouth of the Inlet where it was narrowest, and wait
on a sheltered ledge there for the _Savonarola_ to be ejected with
pikes f