yachts habitually call. Thus, from the very
first, it seemed to me that Hornby and his friends had very cleverly
tricked me for some mysterious purpose, and afterwards ingeniously
evaded their watchers and got clean away.

Had the Italian Admiral been able to send a torpedo-boat or two after
the fugitives they would no doubt soon have been overhauled, yet
circumstances had prevented this and the _Lola_ had consequently
escaped.

For purposes of their own the police kept the affair out of the papers,
and when Frank Hutcheson stepped out of the sleeping-car from Paris on
to the platform at Pisa a few nights afterwards, I related to him the
extraordinary story.

"The scoundrels wanted these, that's evident," he responded, holding up
the small, strong, leather hand-bag he was carrying, and which contained
his jealously-guarded ciphers. "By Jove!" he laughed, "how disappointed
they must have been!"

"It may be so," I said, as we entered the midnight train for Leghorn.
"But my own theory is that they were searching for some paper or other
that you possess."

"What can my papers concern them?" exclaimed the jovial, round-faced
Consul, a man whose courtesy is known to every skipper trading up and
down the Mediterranean, and who is perhaps one of the most cultured and
popular men in the British Consular Service. "I don't keep bank notes in
that safe, you know. We fellows in the Service don't roll in gold as our
public at home appears to think."

"No. But you may have something in there which might be of value to
them. You're often the keeper of valuable documents belonging to
Englishmen abroad, you know."

"Certainly. But there's nothing in there just now except, perhaps, the
registers of births, marriages and deaths of British subjects, and the
papers concerning a Board of Trade inquiry. No, my dear Gordon, depend
upon it that the yacht running ashore was all a blind. They did it so as
to be able to get the run of the Consulate, secure the ciphers, and sail
merrily away with them. It seems to me, however, that they gave you a
jolly good dinner and got nothing in return."

"They might very easily have carried me off too," I declared.

"Perhaps it would have been better if they had. You'd at least have had
the satisfaction of knowing what their little game really was!"

"But the man and the woman who left the yacht an hour before she sailed,
and who slipped away into the country somewhere! I wonder who they were?
Hor