"Sidi—Sidi!" he exclaimed. "While we drowse we are betrayed. Look! Look!"
Landon scrambled to his feet and saw what the timbers of the shadowing boat had hidden before. A white vessel, drifting slowly in from the headland abreast the market quay. As he watched, a white spout of foam and the rattle of the hawse-pipes told that the anchor had been dropped.
She rounded to, the American flag waving lazily from her stern, the burgee of the New York Yacht Club from her peak. They could not read her name across two miles of water, but they did not need to. It was The Morning Star.
Landon went white beneath his tan. He swore.
"We have been here three days—three days, by God! Not a soul in the place knows me or knows that I am not what I profess to be—a Moor from El Dibh. And yet—this! It can't be a coincidence. They know—somehow!"
He looked at Muhammed in sudden fierce suspicion.
"That infernal Jew of yours has sold us!" he cried.
The Moor made a tolerant gesture, the sort of motion a nurse offers a wilful child.
"Sidi! You do not understand. A Jew to sell me! Not this side of the Mediterranean. It means death! Yakoob knows it; it is knowledge that he has sucked in with his mother's milk, chewed with his daily bread, seen written in letters of blood in a score of towns between this and Mequinez. No, Yakoob Ihudi is not in this business. Some other is the instrument of—fate!"
He stooped, lifted little John carefully in his arms, and nodded towards the town gate.