The distance was about a thousand yards back to where the yacht lay.  The cut was a natural stronghold, opening sidewise on the face of the shore, so as to be invisible from the open water.  It was deep enough for an ocean-liner, but too narrow for a big steamer to enter with her own power.  Bedient turned into the thick, thorny 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 from the crooked mouth.  He might leap on the deck as she swung around, but he would then have to face the whole party.

After an interminable period—­it was past three in the afternoon—­the Chinese appeared from a cabin, and sat down on the low rail aft, mopping his shaven head.  “I don’t wish you any harm, little yellow man,” Bedient thought, “but you’d be most accommodating if you would fall into a faint for a minute or two——­”