"I have spoken," continued José Medina. "Now it is for you, señor. Tell me what within the limits of my neutrality I can do to prove to you the sincerity of my respect for England?"
Hillyard took a sheet of paper and a pencil from his pocket. He drew a rough map.
"Here are the Balearic Islands; here, farther to the west, the Columbretes; here the African coast; here the mainland of Spain. Now watch, I beg you, señor, whilst I sketch in the routes of your feluccas. At Oran in Africa your factories stand. From them, then, we start. We draw a broad thick line from Oran to the north-east coast of Mallorca, that coast upon which we look down from these windows, a coast honeycombed with caves and indented with creeks like an edge of fine lace—a very storehouse of a coast. Am I not right, Señor Don José?" He laughed, in a friendly good-humoured way, but the face of José Medina did not lose one shade of its impassiveness. He did not deny that the caves of this coast were the storehouse of his tobacco; nor did he agree.
"Let us see!" he said.
"So I draw a thick line, since all your feluccas make for this island and this part of the island first of all. From here they diverge—you will correct me, I hope, if I am wrong."
"I do not say that I shall correct you if you are wrong," said José Medina.
Hillyard was now drawing other and finer lines which radiated like the sticks of an outspread fan from the north-east coast of Mallorca to the Spanish mainland; and he went on drawing them, unperturbed by José's refusal to assist in his map-making. Some of the lines—a few—ended at the Islands of the Columbretes, sixty miles off Valencia.
"Your secret storehouse, I believe, señor," he remarked pleasantly.
"A cruiser of our Government examined these islands most carefully a fortnight ago upon representations from the Allies, and found nothing of any kind to excite interest," replied José Medina.
"The cruiser was looking for submarine bases, I understand, not tobacco," Martin Hillyard observed. "And since it was not the cruiser's commission to look for tobacco, why should it discover it?"