Then to Jose’s infinite relief the two horsemen rode on.  The long, black, shining barrel of the Colt followed them as they dwindled on the road.  They turned a corner, and as Hillyard replaced his pistol in his pocket, Jose Medina rolled over on his back, and clapped his hands to his face.

“You might have missed,” he gasped.  “One of them at all events.”

Hillyard turned to him with a grin.  The savage was not yet exorcised.

“Why?” he asked.  “Why should I have missed one of them?  It was my business not to.”

Jose Medina flung up his hands.

“I will not argue with you.  We are not made of the same earth.”

Hillyard’s face changed to gentleness.

“Pretty nearly, my friend,” he said, and he laid a hand on Jose Medina’s shoulder.  “For we are good friends—­such good friends that I do not scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself.”

Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed and worked about the quays of Southern Spain.  He touched the right chord now with an unerring skill.  Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the loco Ingles!  But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them—­here was an insidious flattery which no one of Jose Medina’s upbringing could possibly resist.

At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach.  A rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina’s manager from Alicante beside the boat on the sand.  The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the boat.

“We will take charge of the car,” said Jose to his manager, and he stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard.  “This is my adventure.  I see it through to the end,” he explained.

A mile away the felucca picked them up.  Hillyard rolled himself up in a rug in the bows of the boat.  He looked up to the stars tramping the sky above his head.

     “And gentlemen in England now a-bed.”

Drowsily he muttered the immemorial line, and turning on his side slept as only the tired men who know they have done their work can sleep.  He was roused in broad daylight.  The felucca was lying motionless upon the water; no land was anywhere in sight; but above the felucca towered the tall side of the steam yacht Dragonfly.

Fairbairn was waiting at the head of the ladder.  The cases were carried into the saloon and opened.  The top cases were full of documents and letters, some private, most of them political.

“These are for the pundits,” said Hillyard.  He put them back again, and turned to the last case.  In them were a number of small glass tubes, neatly packed in cardboard boxes with compartments lined with cotton wool.

“This is our affair, Fairbairn,” he said.  He took one out, and a look of perplexity crept over his face.  The tube was empty.  He tried another and another, and then another; every one of the tubes was empty.

“Now what in the world do you make of that?” he asked.