“I’m sorry I had to do it,” said Ortho, “but you yourself warned me to trust nobody, above all a fellow renegado. I’m only following your own advice. You’ll wake up before dawn. Good-by.”
Pushing the boat off, he jumped aboard and pulled for the grumble of the bar.
He went aground on the sand-spit, and rowing away from that very nearly stove the boat in on a jag of rock below the Kasba Oudaia. The corner passed, steering was simple for a time, one had merely to keep the boat pointed to the rollers. Over the bar he went, slung high, swung low, tugged on to easy water, and striking a glow on his flint and steel examined the compass.
Thus occasionally checking his course by the needle he pulled due west. He was well ahead of the ship, he thought, and by getting two miles out to sea would be lying dead in her track. Before long the land breeze would be blowing sufficient to push the fog back, but not enough to give the vessel more than two or three knots; in that light shallop he could catch her easily, if she were within reasonable distance.
Reckoning he had got his offing, he swung the boat’s head due north and paddled gently against the run of the tide.
Time progressed; there was no sign of the ship or the land breeze that was to reveal her. For all he knew he might be four miles out to sea or one-half only. He had no landmarks, no means of measuring how far he had come except by experience of how long it had taken him to pull a dinghy from point to point at home in Monks Cove; yet somehow he felt he was about right.
Time went by. The fog pressed about him in walls of discolored steam, clammy, dripping, heavy on the lungs. Occasionally it split, revealing dark corridors and halls, abysses of Stygian gloom; rolled together again. A hundred feet overhead it was clear night and starry. Where was that breeze?
More time passed. Ortho began to think he had failed and made plans to cover the failure. It should not be difficult. He would land on the sands opposite the Bab Malka, overturn the boat, climb over the walls and see the rest of the night out among the Mussulman graves. In the morning he could claim his horse and ride into camp as if nothing had happened. As a slave he had been over the walls time and again; there was a crack in the bricks by the Bordj el Kbir. He didn’t suppose it was repaired; they never repaired anything. Puddicombe didn’t know who had hit him; there was no earthly reason why he should be suspected. The boat would be found overturned, the unknown sailor presumed drowned. Quite simple. Remained the Tangier scheme.