piled into a cart; and leaving
them to follow, presided over by one mounted guard leading his comrade's
horse, we took the other on to Jerez in our car, so that the search party
might be organized the sooner.

Sometimes virtue brings its own reward, and mine came when I learned that
our new companion had met an automobile going at a great pace towards
Jerez. It had gone so fast that, in the dust, he was not sure of the
colour or number of persons inside, but he thought that he had seen
several ladies.

If he could he would have compelled us to stop in Jerez and give evidence
of the attack by brigands; but laughingly we told him that, rather than be
delayed again, we would spill him out by the roadside and vanish into
space before he could set the telegraph to work. As for the brigands, the
leader with three others had escaped, and the faces of those captured were
not known to the guard. But the fact that they had been seven was
significant in his opinion; and he believed that they would prove to be
men of Ecija, forming a band officially supposed to be defunct.

Should we give a hint of our suspicions, we knew well that every effort
would be made to detain us at Jerez, and such a catastrophe I would have
avoided at almost any price, unless there had been a hope of handicapping
Carmona. But that there was no such hope I was as sure as that the
abortive plan had been organized by him.

How he had communicated so quickly with his friends the Seven, I did not
pretend to say, unless he had known where to find their leader, and
visited him this morning in his car. Whatever he had done, however, he
would not have been fool enough to jeopardize his reputation for the sake
of laying me by the heels. The fact that he had claimed the aid of bandits
proved that he wished to dispose of me without implicating himself, though
why he had not adopted the far simpler plan of denouncing me as Casa
Triana to the police, I could not conceive. Still, there was ingenuity in
this idea. If a young man--or two young men--were captured in a lonely place
known to be infected with brigands; if such young men were held for
ransom, and kept out of the way for weeks or months, what was all that to
a Duke of Carmona?

What if, when one of those young men appeared in the world again (minus an
ear or a finger, perhaps), he told a fairy story about the enmity of the
Duke, and reminded the public of an old nurse's tale concerning a bond
between the h