d'industrie_ Haigh, and the
knowledge that that more robust brigand, his blustering, heavy-fisted
partner Cospatric, was close at hand, had given me little leisure to
plan far ahead. All my time was occupied in thinking how to fool the
one and keep out of sight of the other till I could make escape from
their immediate vicinage.

But having once cleared from the island, it seemed to me that all
probable danger of our future meeting was passed; at any rate, Mallorca
would be the most unlikely spot to run foul of them in. So when the
commercial traveller had turned away to look after his own affairs
again, I got hold of Sadi, and told him to pull our traps together and
pay up what we owed.

Sadi turned and set about fulfilling the order without a question. That
is the best of Sadi. He never wants to know the why or wherefore of
anything. Within limits he is the perfection of a servant for a man
such as me.

I had trusted Sadi with many things, and so far he had never failed me.
I felt sure that he liked me, which was more than I would have said for
any other member of the human race. But all the same, if he had seen it
worth his while to rob or betray, I'd a pretty strong notion that blood
instinct would prove too strong, and he'd do it. You see, Sadi's mother
was half Arab, half Portuguese; his father was all Portuguese--jail-bird
Portuguese; his youth had been spent in Marquez, which is on Delagoa
Bay; and these things do not breed immaculate honesty calculated to
stand every strain.

I may have wronged Sadi. As I say, he never failed me. But I felt that
there might reasonably be a limit to his faithfulness, and to let him
have the solving of that inscription which I carried about my person
locked in a fleckless photographic plate might very well have
outstepped that limit. It would have been a heavy test on an
archbishop's honesty.

So I did not intend to employ Sadi about this matter except as a last
resort. I wished to let this, the most valuable secret the world
contained, be known to no one except myself, if it could be so
contrived. I desired to get it stored within my brain alone, and then
to destroy the only other trace of it that was existent.

Yet labouring under my peculiar disadvantage, the task appeared a
hopelessly impossible one.

As I went down the gang-plank and ranged up against Sadi's elbow,
walking with him past the wine casks and other litter on Palma quay, it
seemed to me that after all I