marked stress in Spanish, "_En las filas legitimas_."

Mills was heard, unmoved, like Jove in his cloud: "He's on leave here."

"Of course I don't shout that fact on the housetops," the Captain
addressed me pointedly, "any more than our friend his shipwreck
adventure. We must not strain the toleration of the French authorities
too much! It wouldn't be correct--and not very safe either."

I became suddenly extremely delighted with my company. A man who "lived
by his sword," before my eyes, close at my elbow! So such people did
exist in the world yet! I had not been born too late! And across the
table with his air of watchful, unmoved benevolence, enough in itself to
arouse one's interest, there was the man with the story of a shipwreck
that mustn't be shouted on housetops. Why?

I understood very well why, when he told me that he had joined in the
Clyde a small steamer chartered by a relative of his, "a very wealthy
man," he observed (probably Lord X, I thought), to carry arms and other
supplies to the Carlist army. And it was not a shipwreck in the ordinary
sense. Everything went perfectly well to the last moment when suddenly
the _Numancia_ (a Republican ironclad) had appeared and chased them
ashore on the French coast below Bayonne. In a few words, but with
evident appreciation of the adventure, Mills described to us how he swam
to the beach clad simply in a money belt and a pair of trousers. Shells
were falling all round till a tiny French gunboat came out of Bayonne and
shooed the _Numancia_ away out of territorial waters.

He was very amusing and I was fascinated by the mental picture of that
tranquil man rolling in the surf and emerging breathless, in the costume
you know, on the fair land of France, in the character of a smuggler of
war material. However, they had never arrested or expelled him, since he
was there before my eyes. But how and why did he get so far from the
scene of his sea adventure was an interesting question. And I put it to
him with most naive indiscretion which did not shock him visibly. He
told me that the ship being only stranded, not sunk, the contraband cargo
aboard was doubtless in good condition. The French custom-house men were
guarding the wreck. If their vigilance could be--h'm--removed by some
means, or even merely reduced, a lot of these rifles and cartridges could
be taken off quietly at night by certain Spanish fishing boats. In fact,
salved for the Carlists,