“I could pardon you far graver crimes,” the King said smiling; “and I'm sure your reason, whatever it is, reflects nothing but honour on yourself. I owe you a debt. Claim it's payment in my gratitude whenever you will; the sooner the [pg 280]better. And if you want a friend, you'll know where to find one.”
He held out his hand, and when I took it, shook mine warmly in English fashion. Something else he was about to say on a second thought, when his friend—who had now restored the chauffeur to dazed consciousness—drew his attention. “Sir,” he said, “the guardia civile are coming back without prisoners.”
A minute or two later the two men had galloped up to us, one wounded in the cheek. They had chased the brigands, exchanging shots, until suddenly, having passed beyond a clump of trees and a few lumpy hummocks of sand, the band had vanished as if by magic. The civil guards had explored the spot for some cleverly concealed hiding-place, which they knew must exist within the space of two hundred metres, but they had found nothing. And as they had had no time to ascertain the condition of the men left for us to deal with, they had thought it best to return lest the wounded enemy prove not to be hors de combat after all.
Fortunately the distance from this lonely spot to Jerez was not more than thirty kilometres, and within three miles there was a farm. Here a cart could be got to take the wounded brigands into the town; and from Jerez a posse of men would be immediately sent out to scour the country for the escaped brigands.
The King, whom the guardia civile recognized with respectful surprise, was now anxious to get back to Seville, where he was due in the royal box for the Good Friday procession, and must appear by five o'clock at latest. He delayed only long enough to be sure that his chauffeur was not hurt beyond a slight concussion of the brain, to speak a few kind words to the civil guard, and to say a significantly emphasized “Au revoir” to Dick and me. Then, taking the wheel himself, whilst the half-dazed chauffeur lay in the tonneau, he backed the big, reddish-brown car off the barricade, and darted away in a cloud of dust at a good forty miles an hour.
It was left for us to do what we could to advance the civil guard with their task; and though we had already lost too much [pg 281]time for my peace of mind, it was our plain duty to help those who had helped us. When we had levelled the rough barricade we reluctantly bundled the wounded men into our tonneau, and going at a pace which enabled the civil guards to gallop close behind us, we steered for the farm of which they had spoken. There, in a buzz of excitement, the brigands were piled into a cart; and leaving them to follow, presided over by one mounted guard leading his comrade's horse, we took the other on to Jerez in our car, so that the search party might be organized the sooner.
Sometimes virtue brings its own reward, and mine came when I learned that our new companion had met an automobile going at a great pace towards Jerez. It had gone so fast that, in the dust, he was not sure of the colour or number of persons inside, but he thought that he had seen several ladies.
If he could he would have compelled us to stop in Jerez and give evidence of the attack by brigands; but laughingly we told him that, rather than be delayed again, we would spill him out by the roadside and vanish into space before he could set the telegraph to work. As for the brigands, the leader with three others had escaped, and the faces of those captured were not known to the guard. But the fact that they had been seven was significant in his opinion; and he believed that they would prove to be men of Ecija, forming a band officially supposed to be defunct.
Should we give a hint of our suspicions, we knew well that every effort would be made to detain us at Jerez, and such a catastrophe I would have avoided at almost any price, unless there had been a hope of handicapping Carmona. But that there was no such hope I was as sure as that the abortive plan had been organized by him.
How he had communicated so quickly with his friends the Seven, I did not pretend to say, unless he had known where to find their leader, and visited him this morning in his car. Whatever he had done, however, he would not have been fool enough to jeopardize his reputation for the sake of laying me by the heels. [pg 282]The fact that he had claimed the aid of bandits proved that he wished to dispose of me without implicating himself, though why he had not adopted the far simpler plan of denouncing me as Casa Triana to the police, I could not conceive. Still, there was ingenuity in this idea. If a young man—or two young men—were captured in a lonely place known to be infected with brigands; if such young men were held for ransom, and kept out of the way for weeks or months, what was all that to a Duke of Carmona?