Put briefly and in its order of happening, the story ran as follows:-- The raider, as we had already faintly surmised, was none other than the man with the spectacles in the Genovese _caffe_. His name was Pether--N. Congleton Pether; he was of Jewish extraction, and he was stone-blind. He had been much in Africa, and it was in the southern part of that continent that an accident deprived him of his sight. The injured eyeballs had been surgically removed, and artificial ones mounted in their stead. The man was clever in the extreme in hiding his infirmity; for a week none of the hotel people where he was staying in Genoa even guessed at it. Casual acquaintances scarcely ever detected the missing sense. English being his native tongue, Pether had naturally lost no word of the discussion over Weems's manuscript, and directly the little schoolmaster and myself had left the _caffe_ he had beckoned his servant Sadi, who was within call, and had gone off on his arm towards the harbour. There he threw money about right and left, and the information he wanted was given glibly. A freight steamer consigned to some senna merchants would be sailing for Tripoli at noon on the morrow. To the skipper of this craft he betook himself, and bargained to be set down unostentatiously in Minorca. It would mean a very slight deviation from the fixed course, and what he paid would be money into that skipper's own pocket. You see Pether knew how to set about matters. Had he gone to the shipowners, he would as likely as not have failed, or at any rate been charged an exorbitant fee; but by applying to a badly paid Italian seaman who was not above cooking a log, he got what he wanted for a thousand-franc note. The senna steamer made for neither Ciudadella nor Port Mahon. Her doings were a trifle dark, and she did not want to be reported. But her skipper was a man of local knowledge, and remembered that there were three small harbours on the northern coast of Minorca, used exclusively by fishermen and _contrabandistas_. Further, being a man of guile, he understood the ways of the outpost Carabinero. He knew that if an open boat were seen to come into one of these village harbours from somewhere out of vague seaward darkness, the local preserver of the king's peace and the king's customs would not be rude enough to look in that direction. That uniformed worthy would understand that some gentleman in the neighbourhood wished to land a cargo, probably of smokable tobacco, free of duty. He would know that if he interfered, he would probably test the chill sensation of dull steel jabbed between the shoulder blades before many days were over. He would expect that in the ordinary course of events judicious short-sightedness would be rewarded by notes for many pesetas, and American tobacco in generous quantity. And he would reroll and smoke his Government cigarette, placidly non-interferent, thanking his best saint for the happy time to come.