“Here are the Balearic Islands; here, farther to the west, the Columbretes; here the African coast; here the mainland of Spain.  Now watch, I beg you, senor, whilst I sketch in the routes of your feluccas.  At Oran in Africa your factories stand.  From them, then, we start.  We draw a broad thick line from Oran to the north-east coast of Mallorca, that coast upon which we look down from these windows, a coast honeycombed with caves and indented with creeks like an edge of fine lace—­a very storehouse of a coast.  Am I not right, Senor Don Jose?” He laughed, in a friendly good-humoured way, but the face of Jose Medina did not lose one shade of its impassiveness.  He did not deny that the caves of this coast were the storehouse of his tobacco; nor did he agree.

“Let us see!” he said.

“So I draw a thick line, since all your feluccas make for this island and this part of the island first of all.  From here they diverge—­you will correct me, I hope, if I am wrong.”

“I do not say that I shall correct you if you are wrong,” said Jose Medina.

Hillyard was now drawing other and finer lines which radiated like the sticks of an outspread fan from the north-east coast of Mallorca to the Spanish mainland; and he went on drawing them, unperturbed by Jose’s refusal to assist in his map-making.  Some of the lines—­a few—­ended at the Islands of the Columbretes, sixty miles off Valencia.

“Your secret storehouse, I believe, senor,” he remarked pleasantly.

“A cruiser of our Government examined these islands most carefully a fortnight ago upon representations from the Allies, and found nothing of any kind to excite interest,” replied Jose Medina.

“The cruiser was looking for submarine bases, I understand, not tobacco,” Martin Hillyard observed.  “And since it was not the cruiser’s commission to look for tobacco, why should it discover it?”

Jose Medina shrugged his shoulders.  Jose Medina’s purse was very long and reached very high.  It would be quite impolitic for that cruiser to discover Jose Medina’s tobacco stores, as Medina himself and Martin Hillyard, and the captain of the cruiser, all very well knew.

Martin Hillyard continued to draw fine straight lines westwards from the northern coast of Mallorca to the mainland of Spain, some touching the shore to the north of Barcelona, some striking it as far south as Almeria and Garrucha.  When he had finished his map-making he handed the result to Jose Medina.

“See, senor!  Your feluccas cut across all the trade-routes through the Mediterranean.  Ships going east or going west must pass between the Balearics and Africa, or between the Balearics and Spain.  We are here in the middle, and, whichever course those ships take, they must cross the lines on which your feluccas continually come and go.”

Jose Medina looked at the map.  He did not commit himself in any way.  He contented himself with a question:  “And what then?”