Charnock walked away and left her standing there, nor looked back. Stray lines and verses of ballads which he had heard sung by women in drawing-rooms here and there about the world came back to him--ballads of knights and cavaliers who had ridden away at their ladies' behests. He had laughed at them then, but they came back to him now, and he felt himself linked through them in a community of feeling with the generations which had gone before. Men had gone out upon such errands as he was now privileged to do, and would do so again when he was dust, with just the same pride which he felt as he walked homewards on this night through the streets of Gibraltar. He realised as he had never realised before, through the fellowship of service, that in bone and muscle and blood he was of the family of men, son of the men who had gone before, father of the men who were to follow. The next morning he crossed the straits to Tangier. CHAPTER XVIII IN WHICH THE TAXIDERMIST AND A BASHA PREVAIL OVER A BLIND MAN He went at once to the taxidermist's shop. M. Fournier expected him, but not the story which he had to tell. "You wish to discover the man who shouted through your door six months ago," said Charnock. "It was I." M. Fournier got together his account-books and laid them on the counter of the shop. "I have much money. Where is my friend Mr. Jeremy Bentham?" "It is Hassan Akbar whom we must ask," said Charnock, and he told Fournier of what he had seen on the day of his previous visit to Tangier. The two men walked up to the cemetery gate, where Hassan still sat in the dust, and swung his body to and fro and reiterated his cry "Allah Ben!" as on that day when, clothed as a Moor, Ralph Warriner had come down the hill. It was the tune which that Moor had hummed, and which Miranda had repeated, that had led Charnock to identify the victim and the enemy. Charnock hummed over that tune again as he stood beside the Moor, and the Moor stopped at once from his prayer. "Hassan Akbar, what hast them done with the Christian who hummed that tune and dropped a silver dollar in thy lap at this gate?" Hassan made no answer, and as though his sole anxiety had been lest Warriner should have escaped and returned, he recommenced his cry. "Hassan," continued Charnock, "was it that Christian who betrayed thy wealth? Give him back to us and thou shalt be rich again." "Allah Beh!" cried Hassan. "Allah Beh!" "It is of no use for us to question him," said M. Fournier. "But the Basha will ask him, and in time he will answer. To-morrow I will go to the Basha." Charnock hardly gathered the purport of Fournier's proposal. He went back into the town, and that evening M. Fournier related to him much about Ralph Warriner which he did not know. The idea of running guns in Morocco had appealed to Warriner some time before he put it into practice, and whilst he was still at Gibraltar.