Maseden himself was the first to admit that they had been given sound advice.
Luckily the wind remained steady, and brought their craft on at a fair pace against a falling tide. Nevertheless it was a long sail, far longer than any of them had anticipated, and the shadows were deepening when the men again lifted the Indian girl level with the gunwale to find out if she could recommend the safest way of approaching a particularly forbidding shore.
She understood at once what they wanted, and indicated a narrow channel between two gigantic outlying rocks. Though it was precisely the one of three possible waterways which no stranger would have chosen, they did not dream now of disputing her judgment. The passage was made more easily than they had counted on, and a second time was their faith justified, because a strip of white beach soon showed on the line where trees and sea met.
The boat was run ashore, and a fire was lighted. The weather had become much colder, probably owing to the absence of shelter from the hills under which they had camped during the past month. The Indian girl offered no objection to the fire. In fact, when laid near it in a sand hollow, she fell asleep long before any of them.
The boat, of course, had to be safeguarded, as they landed at low water. Were it not for a fissure in the rock which permitted them to row fully a quarter of a mile nearer high-water mark than would have been possible otherwise, they must have devoted a wearisome time to the task of hauling her in as the tide rose. Fortunately, there was no heavy surf. The reefs they had seen some fifteen miles to the westward had broken up the long Pacific rollers, and the breeze was not strong enough to disturb this inland sea.
Nina and Madge elected to sleep on the sand.
“You can have too much of a good thing,” explained Madge laughingly, “and, greatly as I prize our ark, I am tired of it to-day. Every bone in my body is aching.”
They had, of course, given up each skin and strip of canvas they possessed in order to render the Indian girl more comfortable during the voyage, and a ship’s boat can be a most irksome conveyance in such circumstances.
When the tide was high Sturgess and Maseden, before they, too, turned in, rose to make sure that the anchor could not drag during the night, and Sturgess electrified his friend by choosing that odd moment to allude to the Cartagena marriage.
“Say, Alec,” he said, “you sure have had the time of your life ever since you were hauled off to San Juan and sentenced to be shot.”