Muhammed's steps were bent away from the town towards the row of dilapidated hovels which fringe the bank of sand below the nearer blockhouse. And he walked quickly; there was definite purpose and no sign of hesitation in his stride. He came to a halt before a dwelling, half burrow, half barn, round the entrance of which were clustered half a dozen ragged figures.

The Moor's face was dark in the shadow of his haik hood, but he appeared to need no introduction. He raised a finger and beckoned. One of the lounging figures rose grudgingly and drew aside with him.

"I have it from Yakoob, Signor Luigi, that you leave to-morrow. That must be altered. It may be necessary to make a start to-night."

The other raised a dark Italian face towards the Moor and eyed him questioningly. He shrugged his shoulders.

"I have no charter from Yakoob," he said. "I return home to Salicudi—to await the sponge-fishing season. I need a holiday; this contraband running frets the nerves, do you see? I wish to forget the need of having eyes—and a telescope—at the back of one's head."

For a moment Muhammed was silent, debating, as it seemed, something in which memory or experience gave him no assistance.

"Salicudi?" he questioned.

"In the Lipari group," said the other, laconically. "My home."

"An island?" said the Moor. "And your home? What is it? A house—a hut—a castle? Give me particulars. My chiefest need would be privacy. Can you guarantee it?"

The Italian pondered.

"You flee from—what?" he demanded.

"From a curiosity which still seems to dog my footsteps," said the Moor, drily. "Let it be sufficient for you to know that with three friends I desire to vanish from Melilla to-night. We might find it convenient to remain temporarily on Salicudi. It depends on your neighbors' thirst for information and your capabilities of defeating it."

Signor Luigi gave an expressive and contemptuous wave of the hand.

"On Salicudi are six families—cousins of mine, all of them. I and my brother Sandro alone possess boats or money. The others work for us and are fed. We do not encourage them to think; they do not tire their magnificent brains except under our direction."

Muhammed nodded appreciatively.

"The priest?" he suggested.

"Father Sigismondi serves six islands besides mine," said the smuggler. "He visits us by favor of my boat, when Christian offices are in special demand. It is a matter I regulate myself."

"Carabineers, tax collectors?"

"Of the former, none; we have leave to cut our own throats. Of the latter, one yearly. He is due in about eight months' time."

"Food?"

"Polenta—fish—beans; at times of festa a risotto of kid. We have goats, and therefore milk."

The Moor nodded.

"I am empowered to offer you for your hospitality for myself and friends twenty lire per head per week during our stay on your boat or island," he said slowly.

Luigi scratched his head.

"One hundred lire for the lot?" he temporized. "You have appetites, you Moors; that is notorious."

"We have appetites—for food," agreed Muhammed. "The bill of fare you quote contains little that would be dignified as such in my way of thinking. You will take eighty lire per week, or lose this trade of Yakoob's. Choose quickly."

For the second time the Italian's shoulders rose in a shrug.

"What you will," he said apathetically. "You hold a pistol to my head."

"Try to remember that it remains always loaded," replied the other, and turned briskly towards the port. "You had better see to your arrangements instantly."

He passed across the sand towards the dirty little Marina which fronts the shipping offices and ship-chandlers' booths, leaving his companion staring after him with a frown. Then, for the third time, Signor Luigi shrugged his shoulders and followed, to enter finally a ship's dingy which was tied to the Marina steps. In this he gained a large lateen-rigged boat which swung at her moorings in the bay.

The motor launch floated idly on the ripples at the landing stage immediately below the citadel. The engineer had come ashore and sat on a bench beneath the tarpaulin which had been roughly erected to protect some perishable government stores. In the shadow of the Marina booths, Muhammed halted and looked thoughtfully at the man and then at the launch and finally at the setting sun. The birth of a new and up-lifting emotion could be seen working in his expressive eyes.

"Bismillah!" he exclaimed softly. "The one! Why not the three!"

He drew himself up; a deep breath escaped him. He slipped around the back of the line of booths and reappeared coming as from the citadel. And he had the aspect of haste and importance.

He walked straight up to the waiting engineer.

"I bring an order that you do not await your mistress but return for her in three hours' time," he said in excellent English.

The man looked up in stolid surprise.

"Eh?" he questioned.

"Your mistress has accepted an invitation to dine with the governor," said Muhammed. "You are to return for her at ten o'clock."

The man got up and shook himself lazily as he strolled towards the launch.

"Nice hospitable old cock—what?" he hazarded. "Didn't send me down a small bottle of beer and a sandwich, now did he?"

Muhammed shook his head. The man grunted pessimistically, gave a surly little nod, and sat down behind the launch's steering wheel. A moment later he was grooving a white trail of foam out into the bay.

Muhammed sighed—a sigh which expressed relief, content, and the expansion of a hitherto unleashed excitement. He turned and ran rapidly back along the shore. A second visit to the hovels below the blockhouse resulted in a conference with another of their deplorably clad inhabitants. A taciturn fellow this, of apparently Spanish extraction. But the fact that he wore the remains of an extremely dissolute haik over a pair of remarkably tattered frieze trousers hinted at a cosmopolitanism which was buttressed by his speech. He used the lingua franca and moved amid an almost palpable reek of garlic.

After the exchange of a few rapid sentences, he relapsed into silence but not into inactivity. He paced solemnly down the sand and motioned the Moor to help in the launching of a boat. In it they pulled round the sweep of the bay into the inner port and moored themselves in the berthing which the motor launch had vacated.

The dusk had now become darkness. Lights shone in the booths; the distressing clangor of a gramophone sounded from one albergar, the thrumming of a mandolin from another. There was a clink of spurs as half a score of artillerymen clattered down the citadel ramp, eager for the squalid debaucheries of the port. A guardia civile sauntered along the quayside edge and looked down into the waiting boat.

"Profitable evil-doing is surely at a low ebb when I find El Avispa trying to make an honest penny," he meditated.

Muhammed's companion turned.

"Why do you term me The Wasp, SeÑor?" he asked with a grin of complacence. "Have I been known to sting?"

The guardia made a jerky motion of his thumb in the direction of the great convict establishment upon the hill.

"I don't know, amigo. Your exploits are scheduled up there; have a care that I do not need to refer to them. Whom do you await?"

"The SeÑor and the SeÑora who landed from the yacht," said the boatmen. "They visit the SeÑor Intendente."

The guardia looked doubtful.

"They landed from a boat, a motor boat," he objected.

"Precisely," agreed the other. "It appears that something affected the engine of this, some leak of the jacketing which I do not understand, but which I am informed cools the cylinders. The engineer returned while he could, enlisting my services to await and explain matters to his employer."

"Humph!" grunted the uniformed man. "His choice showed little discretion. See to it that you do not disgrace your opportunity. That seat is bespattered with fish-oil and scales. Wipe it!" He made a commanding gesture towards the offending stain, and walked majestically away.

At the far end of the Plaza he was seen to halt and observe two newcomers, who appeared leisurely descending the citadel ramp. A gold-braided official was in attendance on them, and his gestures were rapid and deferential. The guardia civile saluted and spoke. Muhammed, watching keenly, gave another sigh. Fate was on his side. The very guardians of law and order were unconsciously buttressing his plan. This officious guardia civile was already explaining the situation to Miss Van Arlen and her companion. The onus of explanation—and possible suspicion—was thus being lifted from shoulders possibly less capable of bearing it. He muttered his satisfaction in a hurried undertone.

The girl and Aylmer advanced towards the quayside, the gesticulating official still in attendance. The latter eyed the waiting boat disdainfully.

"Let me demonstrate, SeÑora," he cried, "that our port can supply something less deplorable in the way of shore boats. Let me summon a pinnace and crew from the naval arsenal."

Muhammed's heart stood still. But fate smiled on him yet.

Miss Van Arlen protested that the boat would do well enough, that it was hardly fair to have kept this man waiting by the instructions of her own engineer, as it appeared, and then refuse to engage him. With a smile and bow of farewell she took her seat in the stern, while the guardia civile muttered stern instructions to the rowers anent their duty. They received them in stolid silence. Aylmer took the yoke lines, and amid a renewed demonstration of respect from the men of gold braid, the boat shot out into the darkness.

A slight mist hung over the water, but the riding lights of the yacht were plain enough and Aylmer headed directly for them. He leaned forward and asked a question of the man who pulled stroke oar.

"The SeÑor who came ashore with us?" he queried. "Did you mark him? Did he return in the motor boat?"

The man shrugged his shoulders.

"I did not see it," he said laconically. "Have the goodness to steer well to the right. Your present course will foul a line of net buoys."

Aylmer pulled the line and swerved as directed. And then Claire spoke, with a hint of something in her voice which was nearly akin to suspicion without exactly attaining it.

"Mr. Miller frankly puzzles me," she said.

Aylmer gave a little nod in the darkness.

"Yes," he agreed. "There is a sense of—of estrangement about him. He is good company, a mondain, intelligent, but not—human. One feels that at every turn."

The girl made a gesture towards the shore.

"What can he have to do in that—that ash heap?" she asked. "A man who poses as a flÂneur, a dilettante."

"Pottery?" suggested Aylmer. "He collects; I have seen his collections. They are sound and in good taste, without being remarkable."

"That is what I think," she acquiesced. "For the life-work of a man they are petty. It is mysterious; he is mysterious! Why did he not rejoin us this evening at the governor's office as he promised?"

Aylmer smiled.

"The ardors of the chase," he hazarded. "He is probably sitting in the sanctum of some Jew huckster, chaffering for the least worn of a collection of Rabat rugs or old Mequinez steel-work. He will come on board to-morrow to explain and bid us farewell, and we shall hear all about it."

"About what?" asked the girl enigmatically.

Aylmer smiled again.

"About—what he chooses to tell us," he answered, and jerked the yoke-line energetically, as a couple of oval dark objects loomed up on the surface just ahead.

There was a swish and a dragging sound, and the dark objects disclosed themselves alongside as net buoys. They hung below the gunwale persistently; the boat was obviously brought to a standstill.

"In spite of my warning the SeÑor has fouled the fishing nets," growled the boatman.

"On the contrary," retorted Aylmer, "your directions carried us straight into them. A direct course would have avoided this."

The man shipped his oar and stood up.

"The SeÑor will permit me to pass him?" he said. "The rudder itself must be unshipped to clear us."

Aylmer shifted his seat to one side as the man leaned over him. The next instant he had cried out—a choking cry, smothered under the folds of the sail which the man had heaped bodily upon his head. His hands were grasped and drawn together in the loop of a rope. Lashings were knitted about his limbs with almost miraculous rapidity. Stark and inert, he felt himself rolled into the bottom of the boat, his rage and horror almost suffocating him as he heard the quickly stifled cry which told him that his companion was suffering like treatment. And then, for half a minute, the rapid rumble of the rowlocks was evidence that the boat was being furiously rowed—whither he could not guess.

There was a shock of wood meeting wood. They had run alongside another vessel, or possibly the piles of a landing place. Whispered voices joined those of their captors.

He felt himself lifted, borne staggeringly forward a few paces and then lowered into arms which gripped him from below. There was the creak of reluctant hinges. He was placed not ungently upon a floor of planking. The voices whispered again, something was laid beside him, touching him. The hinges grated, footsteps passed over a floor or deck above his head. And then there was silence.

But out in the bay a few minutes later, the decent stillness of the night was torn into tatters of uproar. The voice of the Spanish boatman was uplifted in appeals for help to every listening saint in Paradise, and to every inhabitant of the Melilla's citadel and port. The sounds reached, as they were meant to reach, the quay. Every guardroom was emptied; the roisterers surged into the street from a dozen albergars and cervecerias. Half a score of boats put out into the night, one manned by the naval police leading.

Lament guiding them, within five minutes they reached a point where El Avispa clung disconsolately to the keel of his upturned boat, bewailing the day of a birth which had developed for him into a life of unremitting sorrow. He was dragged into the police boat and ordered to explain himself.

It was the fault of the foreign SeÑor, he deposed. Justice to himself compelled him to admit that, though he had every regard for the reputation of a cavalier who was now without doubt drowned fathoms deep below the very spot on which the rescuing pinnace swam. Being careless, or perchance engrossed by the attractions of the SeÑora who was for beauty a very swan, the amateur steersman had precipitated them among the mackerel nets. The rudder was fouled. He, Ignacio Baril, sometimes called El Avispa, had stood up to pass to the stern and release it. The SeÑora, with entrancing but unfortunate timidity, had risen in her turn, and the SeÑor, gesticulating in argument, had consummated the disaster. He had leaned sideways, lost his balance, and caused the boat to lurch completely over.

Yes, he himself had put forth the efforts of a Hercules to save, at least, the woman. In deference to the memory of his mother, who was already among the Saints after a lifetime of charity and benevolence, he must bear witness to the fact that her son met this crisis with energy. How was he defeated? The truth must out; again it was the foreign cavalier. In his panic he had clutched and drawn back from the brink of safety the SeÑora—alas! to perdition. The would-be rescuer had desisted from his efforts only when his overtaxed lungs failed him. In a state of semi-unconsciousness, Providence had guided his aimless hand to reach and rest upon the keel of his overturned boat. He had been saved, it was very true, but it was a question if death itself was not to be poignantly preferred to safety coupled with such a burden of grief. His days must be clouded to his life's end.

And thereupon the bay echoed with the shouts of a hundred searchers and the waters glittered in carnival gaiety below the glare of their lights. A couple of hours later one of them halted, as if to rest the rowers, in the shadow of the felucca Santa Margarita. From her bows a long, cord-lashed package was silently lifted on the larger vessel's deck, while three figures scrambled hastily over the gunwale and crept below. Then laboriously the clumsy anchor was hauled home, the broad sail spread to the western breeze, and Signor Luigi steered a straight course into the bosom of the night.