"A.B., eh?"
"Been before the mast on the Warwickshire, Glen--"
"All right. A bob a night is our tax. But no smoking aloft," he added, as I dropped a coin on the table before him.
"'Ow ye like Gib?" asked the half-cast, leading the way up a narrow stairway.
"Like it," I replied.
"Yes, they all does," he mourned, "for one day. But 'ow if you 'ad always to bask on the stewin' old Rock, like a bally lizard? Saint Patrick! If only some toff 'ud pay me a ticket to America!"
He entered a great room, divided by thin wooden partitions into a score of small ones, and, tramping down a hallway, lighted me into the last chamber. Opposite the cot was a tall window with heavy wooden blinds. I flung them open and leaned out over the reja; and all at once, unheralded, the Spain of my dreams leaped into reality. Below, to one side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's main thoroughfare; further away the flat-roofed city descended in moonlit indistinctness into the Mediterranean. From a high-walled garden a pebble-toss away and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees, rose the twang of a guitar and a man's clear voice singing a languorous air of Andalusia. Now and again a peal of laughter broke on the night and drifted away on the wings of the indolent sea-breeze. I rolled a cigarette and lighted it pensively, not in contempt for the "super's" orders, but because some transgression of established law seemed the only fitting celebration of the untrammeled summer that was opening before me.
CHAPTER II
FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA
Gibraltar rises early. Proof of the assertion may be lacking, but certainly not even a "Rock lizard" could recompose himself for another nap after the passing of the crashing military band that snatched me at daybreak back to the waking world. With one bound I sprang from cot to window. But there was no ground for alarm; in gorge-like Waterport street below, Thomas Atkins, a regiment strong, was marching briskly barrackward, sweeping the flotsam of civilian life into the nooks and crannies of the flanking buildings.