“Ah, senor commandant! that name again!  Have you no mercy?  To sit between another pair of—­, and my own wine, too!  Ugh, ugh!”

The old gentleman, whose mouth had been full of turtle the whole time, burst into a violent fit of coughing, and was only saved from apoplexy by Cary’s patting him on the back.

“Ugh, ugh!  The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, and their precious balms.  Ah, senor lieutenant Englishman!  May I ask you to pass those limes?—­Ah! what is turtle without lime?—­Even as a fat old man without money!  Nudus intravi, nudus exeo—­ah!”

“But what of Drake?”

“Do you not know, sir, that he and his fleet, only last year, swept the whole of this coast, and took, with shame I confess it, Cartagena, San Domingo, St. Augustine, and—­I see you are too courteous, senors, to express before me what you have a right to feel.  But whence come you, sir?  From the skies, or the depth of the sea?”

“Art-magic, art-magic!” moaned the bishop.

“Your holiness!  It is scarcely prudent to speak thus here,” said the commandant, who was nevertheless much of the same opinion.

“Why, you said so yourself, last night, senor, about the taking of Cartagena.”

The commandant blushed, and stammered out somewhat—­“That it was excusable in him, if he had said, in jest, that so prodigious and curious a valor had not sprung from mortal source.”

“No more it did, senor,” said Jack Brimblecombe, stoutly:  “but from Him who taught our ‘hands to war, and our fingers to fight.’”

The commandant bowed stiffly.  “You will excuse me, sir preacher:  but I am a Catholic, and hold the cause of my king to be alone the cause of Heaven.  But, senor captain, how came you thither, if I may ask?  That you needed no art-magic after you came on board, I, alas! can testify but too well:  but what spirit—­whether good or evil, I ask not—­brought you on board, and whence?  Where is your ship?  I thought that all Drake’s squadron had left six months ago.”

“Our ship, senor, has lain this three years rotting on the coast near Cape Codera.”

“Ah! we heard of that bold adventure—­but we thought you all lost in the interior.”

“You did?  Can you tell me, then, where the senor governor of La Guayra may be now?”

“The Senor Don Guzman de Soto,” said the commandant, in a somewhat constrained tone, “is said to be at present in Spain, having thrown up his office in consequence of domestic matters, of which I have not the honor of knowing anything.”

Amyas longed to ask more:  but he knew that the well-bred Spaniard would tell him nothing which concerned another man’s wife; and went on.

“What befell us after, I tell you frankly.”

And Amyas told his story, from the landing at Guayra to the passage down the Magdalena.  The commandant lifted up his hands.

“Were it not forbidden to me, as a Catholic, most invincible senor, I should say that the Divine protection has indeed—­”