Will attended to the anchor.  Fred was too anxious for the safety of the only rifle to trust it out of hand, and he hesitated.  Georges Coutlass saved the day by letting go the shivering Syrian maid and slashing at the halyard with his knife.  Down came the great spar with a crash, and as the dhow swung round in answer to anchor and helm, Fred, Will and Brown, between them, contrived to save the sail, Brown complaining that we were the first sailors he ever heard of who did not have rum served them for working overtime in dirty weather.

So we lay, then, wallowing in the jaws of a crescent granite reef, and watched the red glow above the German launch move farther and farther away from us.  We waited there, wet and hungry, until dawn dimmed the flame from the burning roofs of Muanza, Lady Isobel Saffren Waldon loudly accusing us all at intervals of being rank incompetents unfit to be trusted with the lives of fish, and Coutlass afraid of nothing but interruption.  The things he said to the maid, in English—­the only language that they had apparently in common—­would have scandalized a Goanese harbor “guide” or a Rock Scorpion from the lower streets of Gib.  He did not mention marriage to her, beyond admitting that he had half a dozen wives already, and had been too bored by convention ever to submit to the yoke again.  The maid seemed enraptured—­delirious in the bight of his lawless arm, forgetful of her wetting, and only afraid when he left her for a minute.

We dared not try to cook anything, even supposing that had been possible.  Forward was a box full of sand to serve as hearthstone, but the little scraps of fuel we had brought with us were drenched and unburnable, even if the risk of being seen were not too great.  Lady Saffren Waldon told us we were “toe-rag contrivers.”  In fact, now that she was out of reach of the men she feared and hated most, she reverted to type and tried to domineer over us all by the simple old recipe—­audacious arrogance.  Luckily, she slept for an hour or two.

A little before dawn, when it began to be light enough to let us see the outline of the shore, we sent Kazimoto aloft to reeve our hemp rope through the hole that did duty for block, and by the time the sun had pushed the uppermost arc of his rim above the sky-line we once more had the sail set.

The wind was still blowing a gale; the seamanlike precaution would have been to lie where we were at anchor until fairer weather; but daring is forced on the fearfullest, and there was nothing for it but to study out the method by which the unwieldy spar should be made to pass the mast when tacking, drill Fred, Will, Brown and Kazimoto, and then haul up the anchor and sail away before people on shore could see us.