“What else am I here for?” retorted the little Marteen, and though he too laughed, a thrill of triumph ran through the laugh.  “It just needed that shot to round all off.  I was so afraid that we should not hear it, that it might never be fired.  Now it will never be known, if your men keep silent, whether they sunk their cargo or were sunk with it on board.”

The crew once more drove the blades of their oars through the water, and did not slacken till the shore was reached.  They clambered up the rocks to their camp bearing their treasure, and up from the camp again to the spot where Jose’s motor-car was hidden.  Jose talked to the boatmen while the cans were stowed away in the bottom of the car, and then turned to Hillyard.

“There will be no sign of our camp at daybreak.  The tent will be gone—­everything.  If our luck holds—­and why should it not?—­no one need ever know that the Senor Marteen and his friend Jose Medina picnicked for three days upon that cape.”

“But the lighthouse-keepers!  What of them?” objected Hillyard.  In him, too, hope and excitement were leaping high.  But this objection he offered up on the altars of the gods who chastise men for the insolence of triumph.

“What of them?” Jose Medina repeated gaily.  “They, too, are my friends this many a year.”  He seated himself at the wheel of the car.  “Come, for we cannot drive fast amongst these hills in the dark.”

Hillyard will never forget to the day of his death that wild passage through the mountains.  Now it was some sudden twist to avoid a precipice, now a jerk and a halt whilst Jose stared into the darkness ahead of him; here the car jolted suddenly over great stones, then it sank to the axle in soft dust; at another place the bushes whipped their faces; and again they must descend and build a little bridge of boughs and undergrowth over a rivulet.  But so high an elation possessed him that he was unconscious both of the peril and the bruises.  He could have sung aloud.  They stopped an hour after daybreak and breakfasted by the side of the car in a high country of wild flowers.  The sun was hidden from them by a barrier of hills.

“We shall strike an old mine-road in half an hour,” said Jose Medina, “and make good going.”

They came into a district of grey, weathered rock, and, making a wide circuit all that day, crept towards nightfall down to the road between Aguilas and Cartagena; and once more the sea lay before them.

“We are a little early,” said Medina.  “We will wait here until it is dark.  The carabineros are not at all well disposed to me, and there are a number of them patrolling the road.”

They were above the road and hidden from it by a hedge of thick bushes.  Between the leaves Hillyard could see a large felucca moving westwards some miles from the shore and a long way off on the road below two tiny specks.  The specks grew larger and became two men on horses.  They became larger still, and in the failing light Hillyard was just able to distinguish that they wore the grey uniform of the Guardia Civil.