"Yes."
Both men searched the smooth sea for some long, sluggish, inexplicable wave which should break, or for a V-shaped ripple such as a fixed stake will make in a swiftly running stream.
"Not a sign," said the captain, disconsolately.
"No. Yet it is certainly true that the keeper of that lighthouse paid an amount equal to three years' salary into a bank three weeks ago. It is true that oil could be brought into that point, and stored there, and no one but the keeper be the wiser. And it is true that the Acquitania is at this moment in this part of the Mediterranean steaming east for Salonika with six thousand men on board. Let's trail our coat a bit!" said Hillyard, and the captain with a laugh gave an order to the signal boy by his side.
The boy ran aft and in a few seconds the red ensign fluttered up the flagstaff, and drooped in the still air. But even that provocation produced no result. For an hour and a half the Dragonfly steamed backwards and forwards in front of the cape.
"No good!" Hillyard at last admitted. "We'll get on to the Acquitania, and advise her. Meanwhile, captain, we had better make for Gibraltar and coal there."
Hillyard went to the wireless-room, and the yacht was put about for the great scarped eastern face of the Rock.
"One of the blind alleys," said Hillyard, as he ate his breakfast in the deck-saloon. "Next time perhaps we'll have better luck. Something'll turn up for sure."
Something was always turning up in those days, and the yacht had not indeed got its coal on board in Gibraltar harbour when a message came which sent Hillyard in a rush by train through Madrid to Barcelona. He reached Barcelona at half past nine in the morning, took his breakfast by the window of the smaller dining-room in the hotel at the corner of the Plaza Cataluña, and by eleven was seated in a flat in one of the neighbouring streets. The flat was occupied by Lopez Baeza who turned from the window to greet him.
"I was not followed," said Hillyard as he put down his hat and stick. Habit had bred in him a vigilance, or rather an instinct which quickly made him aware of any who shadowed him.