here by the time the world is stirring."

The boatmen bent to their oars with a will, and the boat leaped upon the
water. They had rowed for fifty yards when suddenly far away a cannon
boomed. The crew stopped, and every one in the boat strained his eyes
seawards. Some one whispered, and Hillyard held up his hand for silence.
Thus they sat immobile as figures of wax for the space of ten minutes.
Then Hillyard relaxed from his attention.

"They must have got her plump with the first shot," he said; and,
indeed, there was no other explanation for that boom of a solitary
cannon across the midnight sea.

Jose Medina laughed.

"So the little Marteen had made his arrangements?"

"What else am I here for?" retorted the little Marteen, and though he
too laughed, a thrill of triumph ran through the laugh. "It just needed
that shot to round all off. I was so afraid that we should not hear it,
that it might never be fired. Now it will never be known, if your men
keep silent, whether they sunk their cargo or were sunk with it on
board."

The crew once more drove the blades of their oars through the water, and
did not slacken till the shore was reached. They clambered up the rocks
to their camp bearing their treasure, and up from the camp again to the
spot where Jose's motor-car was hidden. Jose talked to the boatmen while
the cans were stowed away in the bottom of the car, and then turned to
Hillyard.

"There will be no sign of our camp at daybreak. The tent will be
gone--everything. If our luck holds--and why should it not?--no one need
ever know that the Senor Marteen and his friend Jose Medina picnicked
for three days upon that cape."

"But the lighthouse-keepers! What of them?" objected Hillyard. In him,
too, hope and excitement were leaping high. But this objection he
offered up on the altars of the gods who chastise men for the insolence
of triumph.

"What of them?" Jose Medina repeated gaily. "They, too, are my friends
this many a year." He seated himself at the wheel of the car. "Come, for
we cannot drive fast amongst these hills in the dark."

Hillyard will never forget to the day of his death that wild passage
through the mountains. Now it was some sudden twist to avoid a
precipice, now a jerk and a halt whilst Jose stared into the darkness
ahead of him; here the car jolted suddenly over great stones, then it
sank to the axle in soft dust; at another place the bushes whipped their
faces; and again they must