argue with you. We are not made of the same earth."

Hillyard's face changed to gentleness.

"Pretty nearly, my friend," he said, and he laid a hand on Jose Medina's
shoulder. "For we are good friends--such good friends that I do not
scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself."

Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed
and worked about the quays of Southern Spain. He touched the right chord
now with an unerring skill. Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the
loco Ingles! But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them--here was
an insidious flattery which no one of Jose Medina's upbringing could
possibly resist.

At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach. A
rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina's manager from Alicante beside the
boat on the sand. The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the
boat.

"We will take charge of the car," said Jose to his manager, and he
stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard. "This is my
adventure. I see it through to the end," he explained.

A mile away the felucca picked them up. Hillyard rolled himself up in a
rug in the bows of the boat. He looked up to the stars tramping the sky
above his head.

"And gentlemen in England now a-bed."

Drowsily he muttered the immemorial line, and turning on his side slept
as only the tired men who know they have done their work can sleep. He
was roused in broad daylight. The felucca was lying motionless upon the
water; no land was anywhere in sight; but above the felucca towered the
tall side of the steam yacht _Dragonfly_.

Fairbairn was waiting at the head of the ladder. The cases were carried
into the saloon and opened. The top cases were full of documents and
letters, some private, most of them political.

"These are for the pundits," said Hillyard. He put them back again, and
turned to the last case. In them were a number of small glass tubes,
neatly packed in cardboard boxes with compartments lined with cotton
wool.

"This is our affair, Fairbairn," he said. He took one out, and a look of
perplexity crept over his face. The tube was empty. He tried another and
another, and then another; every one of the tubes was empty.

"Now what in the world do you make of that?" he asked.

The tubes had yet to be filled and there was no hint of what they were
to be filled with.

"What I am wondering about is why they troubled to send the tubes at
all?" said Fai