it was not to bury us; but he could make
no move in that direction without the honourable concurrence of the Mayor.

Back, then, we bustled to the Casa Consistorial, with the sensation of
shuttlecocks, played between battledores at cross purposes.

But at last the second battledore was ready to send us in the right
direction. The Mayor, a young man, who looked like a lawyer in tall hat
and frock-coat, was as polite as only a Spaniard can be. He put himself,
and his house, and Manzanares at our service. It was something like being
given the freedom of London; and what was more to the point than anything
else, he offered us as much moto-naphtha as the town possessed, at any
price we pleased to pay.

The question was, how much did the town possess; a single quart, or a
hundred gallons? The Mayor himself was not sure, so we rattled off in an
ancient "simon" to the cemetery to find out; and luckily were able to
carry away all we were likely to need for the next two days, while leaving
some for the locusts. But between the Casa Consistorial, the house of the
_cura_, the distant cemetery, and the drive back to our stable-garage, it
had taken us nearly three hours to achieve our end. Then there was a
little lingering with the car, to make sure that all was well and no more
tricks had been played; and the walk back to the _fonda_ exhausted the
last of my patience. I had not expected to be gone more than an hour, and
I had been gone three. Meanwhile, I said to myself, almost anything might
have happened. My idea had been to get back by the time that Monica was
dressed, and now, for all I could tell, she might have gone.

Dick laughed at this suggestion, for, said he, Carmona's chauffeur was not
a worker of miracles except, perhaps, on other men's cars; and he could
not have got his master's in order and ready to start. His arguments were
reasonable; nevertheless, like many other plausible deductions, they were
wrong; for the first news we heard at the hotel was that the grey
automobile had left nearly an hour before. The chauffeur, it seemed, had
been up all night working, and had had assistance in the early morning at
a machine-shop. The injuries had been patched up, and the car was expected
to get on either to Andujar, or Linares if a certain bridge had been
finished.

After all, this was not as bad as if we had made no promise to the
Duchess. We were bound not to lie in wait for, or closely follow, her
son's car; and had i