Sallie's lower lip trembled a little. She did not quite know how to thank the punctilious engineer who had proved himself such a friend in need. And time was passing.
"You're always very good to me, Mr. Brasse," she said timidly.
"Not at all," he returned with formal politeness, and, having saluted again, went on his own way toward the bridge.
When Sallie got back to the poop she found Reuben Yoxall awaiting her there and the canvas boat already afloat. The mate, however slow-witted, was smart enough in all his movements once he had made up his mind. He helped her over the side without any more words, and was soon driving the light boat along a straight, swift line for the landing-place.
Sallie's sense of direction enabled her to show him that, and also brought them safely across the bar into the lagoon where the other boats from the Olive Branch were lying empty, afloat. The third mate and some of the men had seemingly been left there in charge of them. Sallie caught sight of the former's sullen, furtive features in the sudden, foolhardy light of a match he was holding over the pipe whose bowl his hands hid. And there were shapes moving about him. She laid a shaky hand on one of Yoxall's, and the oar in his, dipping, shifted their course.
The boom of the breakers, behind them, killed all other sound. But she lifted a finger to her lips, and he proved sufficiently quick-witted then. Between them, they beached their own boat in the dark a couple of hundred yards nearer the camp, and waded ashore with it, and left it there, up-side down on the sand.
The same magnetic instinct which had brought them safely across the bar to the beach led her almost straight to the mouth of the narrow ravine through which Captain Dove and she had reached the red-haired Emir's camp. And Reuben Yoxall followed her, blind, through the night.
"It was here that he was to meet us," she whispered breathlessly, her heart in her mouth. They had met no one at all by the way, and there seemed to be no one there.
Yoxall scowled about him, unseeingly, and bit his lip, in helpless dissatisfaction with everybody and everything. Then he sniffed inquiringly, and in an instant all his relaxed muscles were taut again. A faint whiff of tobacco-smoke had reached his nostrils on the hot, humid night-air.
Sallie was aware of it too, and had snatched at his hand, to draw him on tiptoe toward the base of the great rock-wall that cropped up out of the sand there. They reached its shelter unseen and unheard as a harsh, suppressed voice spoke from round the corner, within the velvet-black mouth of the gorge. It was Hobson's, the second mate's.