Far down in his breast there ached the dull ceaseless pain of a love forever lost, which drowned every other feeling and made him indifferent to it.
When the custom-house officers came aboard he was surprised—after a languid fashion, and as one thinking of some casual acquaintance rather than himself—that no detectives accompanied them, and that he was not arrested for murder, but when he found that no inquiry was made for him, and he was at liberty to go and come as he pleased, there was no corresponding relief or elation visible in his manner.
On bidding the captain adieu he thanked him for his great kindness. “I owe you my life,” he remarked, “and when I am certain that I am grateful to you for preserving it, I will thank you more warmly,” with which enigmatical sentence he passed ashore.
As health returned his tortured mind sought relief in excitement and he left Cadiz for Madrid, where he strove to allay the grief which gnawed at his heart by plunging into the wild excitement of that hot-headed and hot-blooded capital. After a time the ferocious excitement of the weekly bull fight ceased to deaden the agony which preyed at his heart, and he allied himself with a revolutionary movement, which had the advantage of promising equal excitement with some risk to the life which had long been a burden to him.
The Carlist rising seemed like the first glimpse of Heaven’s good will to him, and as such he embraced the opportunity it afforded. The contagious excitement aroused by the Pretender, thrilled through his being, and, at length, he opened his soul to his fellow-men. It were more correct, perhaps, to say fellow-man, since his sole companion and confidant was a much-travelled Spanish soldier of fortune, whose desperate circumstances, as narrated by himself, had first melted the icy reserve which begirt the heart-sore wanderer.
As the two travelled together to the front, the stranger, by insidious inquiries gathered piecemeal George Montgomery’s history. More particularly, however, he seemed interested in the bulky telegraphic code which the other carried with him, and he was puzzled, he said, with his eternal smile, to understand how a book of the kind could be of any practical value; he appeared to be unlettered in business ways, and the other, to while away the long evenings, explained to him the working of the code, as he would have elucidated any ordinary puzzle.
“It seems plain to you, doesn’t it?” said his friend, one night, laughingly, as he clasped his head in his palms at the end of a long explanation, “yet I swear the whole thing is Greek to me. I suppose my brain must be unusually dense.”
That night a false alarm was given, and, in the confusion, George Montgomery was parted from his friend. When order was at length restored, and the former endeavored to collect his baggage, he found that his telegraphic cipher was missing. A hasty march was made from the dangerous locality, and in the darkness he was parted from his friend, whom he did not see again. “It is the fortune of war,” he remarked, somewhat bitterly to himself, for he had grown to like his new-found friend, and in the daily exigencies of an exciting life he soon forgot his passing acquaintance.
The date of this alarm was the 5th of August. On the 10th the firm of Alford & Montgomery, in New York, received a cable message in cipher, of which the translation was:
“Please remit by cable to the Bank of Madrid, five thousand dollars, payable to my order without identification.