“Well, you know best, I suppose,” said the captain and gave him a small compass, refusing payment.
“Come back and see us before you go,” he shouted as Ortho went out of the gate.
“Surely,” the latter replied and rode southwards for Sallee at top speed, knowing full well that, unless luck went hard against him, so far from seeing Ben MacBride again he would be out of the country before midnight.
While Ourida lived, life in Morocco had its compensations; with her death it had become insupportable. He had ridden down to the sea filled with a cold determination to seize the first opportunity of escape and, if none occurred, to make one. Plans had been forming in his mind of working north to Tangier, there stealing a boat and running the blockade into beleaguered Gibraltar, some forty miles distant, a scheme risky to the point of foolhardiness. But remain he would not.
Now unexpectedly, miraculously, an opportunity had come. Despite his denials he had seen something from MacBride’s tower; the upper canvas of a ship protruding from the fog about a mile and a half out from the coast, by the cut and the long coach-whip pennant at the main an Englishman. Just a glimpse as the royals rose out of a trough of the fog billows, just the barest glimpse, but quite enough. Not for nothing had he spent his boyhood at the gates of the Channel watching the varied traffic passing up and down. And a few minutes earlier MacBride had unwittingly supplied him with the knowledge he needed, the pace and direction of the tide. Ortho knew no arithmetic, but common sense told him that if he galloped he should reach Sallee two hours ahead of that ship. She had no wind, she would only drift. He drove his good horse relentlessly, and as he went decided exactly what he would do.
It was dark when he reached the Bab Sebta, and over the low-lying town the fog lay like a coverlet.
He passed through the blind town, leaving the direction to his horse’s instinct, and came out against the southern wall. Inquiring of an unseen pedestrian, he learnt he was close to the Bab Djedid, put his beast in a public stable near by, detached one stirrup, and, feeling his way through the gate, struck over the sand banks towards the river. He came on it too far to the west, on the spit where it narrows opposite the Kasba Oudaia of Rabat; the noise of water breaking at the foot of the great fortress across the Bon Regreg told him as much.
Turning left-handed, he followed the river back till he brought up against the ferry boats. They were all drawn up for the night; the owners had gone, taking their oars with them. “Damnation!” His idea had been to get a man to row him across and knock him on the head in midstream; it was for that purpose that he had brought the heavy stirrup. There was nothing for it now but to rout a man out—all waste of precious time!
There was just a chance some careless boatman had left his oars behind. Quickly he felt in the skiffs. The first was empty, so was the second, the third and the fourth, but in the fifth he found what he sought. It was a light boat too, a private shallop and half afloat at that. What colossal luck! He put his shoulders to the stem and hove—and up rose a man.
“Who’s that? Is that you, master?”