"We have it, my friend Marteen," whispered José Medina, with a laugh of sheer excitement. He was indeed hardly less stirred than Hillyard himself. "Not for nothing did the little Marteen lead the horse across the beach of Benicassim. Now we will row back quickly. We must be far away from here by the time the world is stirring."
The boatmen bent to their oars with a will, and the boat leaped upon the water. They had rowed for fifty yards when suddenly far away a cannon boomed. The crew stopped, and every one in the boat strained his eyes seawards. Some one whispered, and Hillyard held up his hand for silence. Thus they sat immobile as figures of wax for the space of ten minutes. Then Hillyard relaxed from his attention.
"They must have got her plump with the first shot," he said; and, indeed, there was no other explanation for that boom of a solitary cannon across the midnight sea.
José Medina laughed.
"So the little Marteen had made his arrangements?"
"What else am I here for?" retorted the little Marteen, and though he too laughed, a thrill of triumph ran through the laugh. "It just needed that shot to round all off. I was so afraid that we should not hear it, that it might never be fired. Now it will never be known, if your men keep silent, whether they sunk their cargo or were sunk with it on board."
The crew once more drove the blades of their oars through the water, and did not slacken till the shore was reached. They clambered up the rocks to their camp bearing their treasure, and up from the camp again to the spot where José's motor-car was hidden. José talked to the boatmen while the cans were stowed away in the bottom of the car, and then turned to Hillyard.
"There will be no sign of our camp at daybreak. The tent will be gone—everything. If our luck holds—and why should it not?—no one need ever know that the Señor Marteen and his friend José Medina picnicked for three days upon that cape."
"But the lighthouse-keepers! What of them?" objected Hillyard. In him, too, hope and excitement were leaping high. But this objection he offered up on the altars of the gods who chastise men for the insolence of triumph.
"What of them?" José Medina repeated gaily. "They, too, are my friends this many a year." He seated himself at the wheel of the car. "Come, for we cannot drive fast amongst these hills in the dark."