"I bring an order that you do not await your mistress but return for her in three hours' time," he said in excellent English.
The man looked up in stolid surprise.
"Eh?" he questioned.
"Your mistress has accepted an invitation to dine with the governor," said Muhammed. "You are to return for her at ten o'clock."
The man got up and shook himself lazily as he strolled towards the launch.
"Nice hospitable old cock—what?" he hazarded. "Didn't send me down a small bottle of beer and a sandwich, now did he?"
Muhammed shook his head. The man grunted pessimistically, gave a surly little nod, and sat down behind the launch's steering wheel. A moment later he was grooving a white trail of foam out into the bay.
Muhammed sighed—a sigh which expressed relief, content, and the expansion of a hitherto unleashed excitement. He turned and ran rapidly back along the shore. A second visit to the hovels below the blockhouse resulted in a conference with another of their deplorably clad inhabitants. A taciturn fellow this, of apparently Spanish extraction. But the fact that he wore the remains of an extremely dissolute haik over a pair of remarkably tattered frieze trousers hinted at a cosmopolitanism which was buttressed by his speech. He used the lingua franca and moved amid an almost palpable reek of garlic.
After the exchange of a few rapid sentences, he relapsed into silence but not into inactivity. He paced solemnly down the sand and motioned the Moor to help in the launching of a boat. In it they pulled round the sweep of the bay into the inner port and moored themselves in the berthing which the motor launch had vacated.
The dusk had now become darkness. Lights shone in the booths; the distressing clangor of a gramophone sounded from one albergar, the thrumming of a mandolin from another. There was a clink of spurs as half a score of artillerymen clattered down the citadel ramp, eager for the squalid debaucheries of the port. A guardia civile sauntered along the quayside edge and looked down into the waiting boat.