Aylmer smiled. "The ardors of the chase," he hazarded. "He is probably sitting in the sanctum of some Jew huckster, chaffering for the least worn of a collection of Rabat rugs or old Mequinez steel-work. He will come on board to-morrow to explain and bid us farewell, and we shall hear all about it." "About what?" asked the girl enigmatically. Aylmer smiled again. "About--what he chooses to tell us," he answered, and jerked the yoke-line energetically, as a couple of oval dark objects loomed up on the surface just ahead. There was a swish and a dragging sound, and the dark objects disclosed themselves alongside as net buoys. They hung below the gunwale persistently; the boat was obviously brought to a standstill. "In spite of my warning the Señor has fouled the fishing nets," growled the boatman. "On the contrary," retorted Aylmer, "your directions carried us straight into them. A direct course would have avoided this." The man shipped his oar and stood up. "The Señor will permit me to pass him?" he said. "The rudder itself must be unshipped to clear us." Aylmer shifted his seat to one side as the man leaned over him. The next instant he had cried out--a choking cry, smothered under the folds of the sail which the man had heaped bodily upon his head. His hands were grasped and drawn together in the loop of a rope. Lashings were knitted about his limbs with almost miraculous rapidity. Stark and inert, he felt himself rolled into the bottom of the boat, his rage and horror almost suffocating him as he heard the quickly stifled cry which told him that his companion was suffering like treatment. And then, for half a minute, the rapid rumble of the rowlocks was evidence that the boat was being furiously rowed--whither he could not guess. There was a shock of wood meeting wood. They had run alongside another vessel, or possibly the piles of a landing place. Whispered voices joined those of their captors. He felt himself lifted, borne staggeringly forward a few paces and then lowered into arms which gripped him from below. There was the creak of reluctant hinges. He was placed not ungently upon a floor of planking. The voices whispered again, something was laid beside him, touching him. The hinges grated, footsteps passed over a floor or deck above his head. And then there was silence. But out in the bay a few minutes later, the decent stillness of the night was torn into tatters of uproar. The voice of the Spanish boatman was uplifted in appeals for help to every listening saint in Paradise, and to every inhabitant of the Melilla's citadel and port. The sounds reached, as they were meant to reach, the quay. Every guardroom was emptied; the roisterers surged into the street from a dozen _albergars_ and _cervecerias_. Half a score of boats put out into the night, one manned by the naval police leading.