Meanwhile, our former acquaintance, Alvarez, whom we lost sight of at the Careenage, had successfully made his way through the Cuban jungle, and, arriving at the port of Matanzas, with the remainder of the men, had sailed thence to Vera Cruz, in Mexico, where he had received a high appointment from the viceroy, which he now held. De Soto had travelled with him to Mexico, and, for so gallant a gentleman, had been singularly unfortunate. Alvarez had found it impossible to disabuse his mind of the idea that de Soto had the cryptogram in his possession, and, remembering what had been said by him about the Holy Office, had brought the fact before the notice of that body, repeating de Soto's remarks and denouncing him as a heretic. The unfortunate man was thereupon seized, thrown into prison, and, under the direction of the villain Alvarez, dreadfully tortured, ostensibly to compel him to retract his words against the Inquisition, but really to enable Alvarez to wring from de Soto the cipher, as the price of his release from prison and torture. The persistent and unwavering assertions of de Soto that he had not the paper, and knew naught of its whereabouts, were received with incredulity, and the unhappy man was tortured again and again to force from him the disclosure of its hiding-place. The supposed burning of the cathedral at La Guayra had been merely a ruse to get rid of the spoilers. Several of the priests had hit upon the ingenious idea of setting fire to large quantities of damp straw in certain secluded parts of the building, and the smoke, drifting hither and thither through the interior, had caused the English to believe that the place was indeed on fire, and had occasioned their hasty flight. The disappearance of Harry and Roger, on the other hand, was purely due to chance, and had not, as might be imagined, been brought about by design. The explanation was simple enough. It happened that the paving of one of the aisles had been undergoing repair at the time of Cavendish's attack upon the town. One of the large paving-slabs was loose, and Harry and Roger, in their haste to escape, had trodden on it, causing it to tilt, and they had fallen into the vault below; their unconscious bodies being soon afterwards discovered by the priests, when the latter went to extinguish the burning straw upon the departure of the raiders.