"Why?" he asked. "Why should I have missed one of them? It was my business not to."
José Medina flung up his hands.
"I will not argue with you. We are not made of the same earth."
Hillyard's face changed to gentleness.
"Pretty nearly, my friend," he said, and he laid a hand on José Medina's shoulder. "For we are good friends—such good friends that I do not scruple to drag you into the same perils as myself."
Hillyard had not wasted his time during those three years when he loafed and worked about the quays of Southern Spain. He touched the right chord now with an unerring skill. Hillyard might be the mad Englishman, the loco Inglés! But to be reckoned by one of them as one of them—here was an insidious flattery which no one of José Medina's upbringing could possibly resist.
At nightfall they drove down across the road on to the beach. A rowing-boat was waiting, and Medina's manager from Alicante beside the boat on the sand. The cases were quickly transferred from the car to the boat.
"We will take charge of the car," said José to his manager, and he stepped into the boat, and sat down beside Hillyard. "This is my adventure. I see it through to the end," he explained.
A mile away the felucca picked them up. Hillyard rolled himself up in a rug in the bows of the boat. He looked up to the stars tramping the sky above his head.
"And gentlemen in England now a-bed."