Something was always turning up in those days, and the yacht had not indeed got its coal on board in Gibraltar harbour when a message came which sent Hillyard in a rush by train through Madrid to Barcelona.  He reached Barcelona at half past nine in the morning, took his breakfast by the window of the smaller dining-room in the hotel at the corner of the Plaza Cataluna, and by eleven was seated in a flat in one of the neighbouring streets.  The flat was occupied by Lopez Baeza who turned from the window to greet him.

“I was not followed,” said Hillyard as he put down his hat and stick.  Habit had bred in him a vigilance, or rather an instinct which quickly made him aware of any who shadowed him.

“No, that is true,” said Baeza, who had been watching Hillyard’s approach from the window.

“But I should like to know who our young friend is on the kerb opposite, and why he is standing sentinel.”

Lopez Baeza laughed.

“He is the sign and token of the commercial activity of Spain.”

From behind the curtains, stretched across the window, both now looked down into the street.  A youth in a grey suit and a pair of orange-coloured buttoned boots loitered backwards and forwards over about six yards of footwalk; now he smoked a cigarette, now he leaned against a tree and idly surveyed the passers by.  He apparently had nothing whatever to do.  But he did not move outside the narrow limits of his promenade.  Consequently he had something to do.

“Yes,” continued Baeza with a chuckle, “he is a proof of our initiative.  I thought as you do three days ago.  For it is just three days since he took his stand there.  But he is not watching this flat.  He is not concerned with us at all.  He is an undertaker’s tout.  In the house opposite to us a woman is lying very ill.  Our young friend is waiting for her to die, so that he may rush into the house, offer his condolences and present the undertaker’s card.”

Hillyard left the youth to his gruesome sentry-go and turned back into the room.  A man of fifty, with a tawny moustache, a long and rather narrow face and eyeglasses, was sitting at an office table with some papers in front of him.

“How do you do, Fairbairn?” Hillyard asked.

Fairbairn was a schoolmaster from the North of England, with a knowledge of the Spanish tongue, who had thrown up schoolmastering, prospects, everything, in October of 1914.

“Touching the matter of those ships,” said Hillyard, sitting down opposite to Fairbairn.

Fairbairn grinned.

“It worked very well,” said he, “so far.”

Hillyard turned towards Lopez and invited him to a seat.  “Let me hear everything,” he said.

Spanish ships were running to England with the products of Cataluna and returning full of coal, and shipowners made their fortunes and wages ran high.  But not all of them were content.  Here and there the captains and the mates took with them in their cabin to England lists of questions thoughtfully compiled by German officers; and from what they saw in English harbours and on English seas and from what secret news was brought to them, they filled up answers to the questions and brought them back to the Germans in Spain.  So much Hillyard already knew.