The thousand yards from the mouth of the cove to the moorings of the Savonarola wound like a Malay creese with an interrogation point for a handle. The distance consumed an hour, and much of the vitality he had summoned by sheer force of will. He lay panting at last in the smothering thicket, thirty feet from the rear-deck of the Savonarola. Yet there was a laugh in his mind.