Supplied with a bucket by a sailor, I climbed on deck and approached the galley. The cook was snoring in a corner of his domain; his understudy was nowhere to be seen. I tip-toed to the hot-water faucet and was soon below again stripping off my "ship's clothes," which the obliging seaman, having bespoken this reward, caught up one by one as they fell. The splashing of water aroused the encircling sleepers. Gradually they slid to the deck and gathered around me, inquiring the details of my eccentric plan. By the time I was dressed in the best my suitcase offered, every mortal in the "single" quarters had come at least once to bid me a dubious farewell.
The commissario returned and led the way in silence along the deserted promenade to the deck abaft the cabins. The Prinzessin lay at anchor. A half-mile away, across a placid lagoon, towered the haggard Rock of Gibraltar, a stone-faced city strewn along its base. About the harbor, glinting in the slanting sunlight, prowled rowboats, sloops, and yawls, and sharp-nosed launches. One of the latter soon swung in against the starboard ladder and there stepped on deck two men in white uniforms, who seated themselves without a word at a table which the commissario produced by some magic of his own, and fell to spreading out impressive documents. A glance sufficed to recognize them Englishmen. At length the older raised his head with an interrogatory jerk, and the commissario, with the air of a man taken red-handed in some rascality, minced forward and laid on the table a great legal blank with one line scrawled across it.
"T 'ird classy maneefesto, signori," he apologized.
"Eh!" cried the Englishman. "A steerage passenger for Gibraltar?"
The steward jerked his head backward toward me.
"Humph!" said the spokesman, inspecting me from crown to toe. "Where do you hail from?"
Before I could reply there swarmed down the companionway a host of cabin passengers, in port-of-call array, whom the Englishman greeted with bared head and his broadest welcome-to-our-city smile; then bowed to the launch ladder. As he resumed his chair I laid my passport before him.
"For what purpose do you desire to land in Gibraltar?" he demanded.
"I am bound for Spain--" I began.
"Spain!" shouted the Briton, with such emphasis as if that land lay at the far ends of the earth. "Indeed! Where are you going from Gibraltar, and how soon?"