Again he smiled thoughtfully.
"Alverez I left," he explained; "his ways are not my ways. I came to England. I do not like this country," he said frankly. "Your lower classes are gross people, and very quarrelsome."
A few more questions were asked, and answered, and ten minutes later T. B. was flying back to Scotland Yard with the story of the stolen battleship.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE "MARIA BRAGANZA"
Once more were the Nine Men in the bill of every newspaper in London. Once more the cables hummed from world's end to world's end, and slowly, item by item, came fragmentary scraps of news which Scotland Yard pieced together.
"Of all extraordinary developments," said the London Journal, "in any great criminal case, nothing has ever equalled, in its improbability, the present phase of this remarkable case.
"And now we have reached the stage which we confidently hope will be a final one. It is clear that these men, having command of enormous riches, gained at the sacrifice of life, and by the ruin of thousands of innocent people, secured to their service the Captain of the Brazilian warship, Maria Braganza. So that somewhere in the wide seas of the world is a stolen battleship, having on board a congregation of the world's worst rascals, Napoleonic in the largeness of their crimes.
"Many and fantastic are the suggestions that have been put forward as to the whereabouts of the Nine Men of Cadiz. One of our contemporaries draws a fanciful picture of life on some gorgeous Southern Pacific isle, out of the track of steamers, and pictures the Nine Men living in a condition of Oriental splendour, an existence of dolce far niente. Such a supposition is, of course, on the face of it absurd. Such an island exists only in the fancy of the romantic writer. The uninhabited portions of the globe are few, and are, in the main, of the character of the Sahara desert. Wherever life can be sustained, wherever comfort and freedom from disease wait the newcomer, be sure the newcomer has already arrived."
This much is quoted from the Journal because it approaches near enough to truth and actuality to merit quotation.