The closer I faced the desperate work remaining unaccomplished the less I enjoyed the outlook, the more improbable appeared success.

Getting aboard the "Santa Maria" was now, to my mind, the simplest part of the adventure, but beyond the accomplishment of that feat I could perceive little to encourage me.

What must necessarily follow my safe gaining of that guarded deck, during the dark hours of the night, depended so largely upon the occurrence of helpful circumstances, any definite plan of action arranged beforehand became simply an impossibility.

Still, striving to make allowances for the unexpected, I managed to put together a chain of details, trusting, with the blind faith of a fatalist, that these would somehow fall into line when the hour came.

If they failed, as was likely, I determined to shift them about in any way possible as each fresh emergency arose.
I realized how small a part any preliminary survey holds in such an enterprise as now fronted me, an enterprise to be worked out amid darkness and grave personal peril, where any bungling act or false move might overturn everything in an instant; yet it is always well--or at least so I have found it--to trace some outline of procedure, rather than trust wholly to the intuitions of the moment.