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Bare posts hacked to the ground were all that remained of Fort Gibraltar's old wall. I had not gone many paces across the former courtyard, when voices sounded from the gravel-pit that had once done duty as a cellar. The next thing I noticed was the shaggy face of Louis Laplante bobbing above the ground.

I think it must have been half nightmare, or perhaps too much frozen pudding at dinner, after the long warm tramp up Gibraltar's steep sides; at any rate it all happened just as I tell you.

"You don't expect to find our brigades in Fort Gibraltar's cellar," said I, backing away from them and piecing this latest information to what I had already heard of plots and conspiracies. Forthwith I felt strong hands gripping both my arms like a vise and the coils of a rope were about me with the swiftness of a lasso.

At Gibraltar, with what was left of his two thousand pesetas and the credit which his manner gained him, he secured a cargo of tobacco. "Gibraltar's a free port, you see," said Hillyard. "José ran the cargo along the coast to Benicassim, a little watering-place with a good beach about thirty kilometres east of Valencia. He ran the felucca ashore one dark night."

If there was joy in England over Rodney's achievement, still more and more sympathetic was the exultation of those who in the isolation of Gibraltar's Rock, rarely seeing their country's flag save on their own flagstaff, witnessed and shared the triumph of his entrance there with his train of prizes.

Even at this moment he carried hidden in a match-box a little phial, which never left him, to put the sure impediment between himself and a forced confession of his aims and knowledge. But he was not aware of it. How many times had he seen the red light at Europa Point on Gibraltar's edge change to white, sometimes against the scarlet bars of dawn, sometimes in the winter against a wall of black!

We would run a standpipe up the side, and connect it with an oil pipe line, fill Gibraltar's tunnels and avenues, and magazines and barracks with crude oil, and touch a match to it, and not an Englishman would live to tell about it. Gee, but I would be sorry for the Irish soldiers, but I guess they wouldn't be there, cause they wouldn't fight America.

Laugh, I say, or be a hitching-post, and we'll dance the May-pole round you! We're vampires, comrade, and you're our cousin, for you're a bat," and Louis applauded his joke with loud, tipsy laughter and staggered up to me drunk as a lord. His heavy breath and bloodshot eyes testified what he had found under the rubbish heaps of Fort Gibraltar's cellar.

He had been there now twelve years and was just entering upon his third term. Moreover, he had fortified his position; his enemies were now powerless to do him harm; and at the time this story finds him he had constructed a machine which rendered his hold upon his State as unshakable as Gibraltar's famous rock.

Past Tarifa Point they went, having the coast of Africa on their right; past the bay of Algegiras, where the San Antonio did not try to harbour; past Gibraltar's grey old rock, where the signal fires were burning, and so at nightfall, with not a mile between them, out into the Mediterranean Sea.