They stopped, and by pantomime explained to the Spaniard that they wanted to get back again as soon as possible.

He nodded, made a circle with his arm, and, as they understood, explained that they were making a circuit, and would arrive ere long at their starting-place.

For another hour and a half they rode along, chatting gayly.

“I say, Jack,” Hawtry exclaimed suddenly, “why, there’s the sun pretty nearly down, and here we are among the hills, in a lonelier looking place than we have come to yet.  I don’t believe we’re anywhere near Gib.  I say, old fellow, it strikes me we’re getting into a beastly mess.  What on earth’s to be done?”

They checked their mules, and looked at each other.

“What can the Spaniard’s game be, Hawtry?  We’ve had a good five shillings’ worth.”

“Let us take our own bearings,” Hawtry said.  “The sun now is nearly on our left.  Well, of course, that is somewhere about west-sou-west, so we must be going northward.  I don’t think that can be right.  I’m sure it can’t.  Look here, you fellow, there is the sun setting there”—­and he pointed to it—­“Gibraltar must lie somewhere over there, and that’s the way we mean to go.”

The Spaniard looked surly, then he pointed to the road ahead, and indicated that it bent round the next spur of the hill, and made a detour in the direction in which Hawtry indicated that Gibraltar must lie.

“What on earth shall we do, Jack?  If this fellow means mischief, we are in an awkward fix.  I don’t suppose he intends to attack us, because we with our dirks would be a match for him with that long knife of his.  But if he means anything, he has probably got some other fellows with him.”

“Then hadn’t we better go in for him at once,” Jack said, “before he gets any one to help him?”

Hawtry laughed.

“We can hardly jump off our mules and attack him without any specific reason.  We might get the worst of it, and even if we didn’t how should we get back again, and how should we account for having killed our mule-driver?  No.  Whatever we are in for, we must go through with it now, Jack.  Let us look as though we trusted him.”

So saying, they continued on the road by which they had previously travelled.

“I don’t believe,” Hawtry said, after a short silence, “that they can have any idea of cutting our throats.  Midshipmen are not in the habit of carrying much money about with them, but I have heard of Guerillas carrying people off to the mountains and getting ransoms.  There, we are at the place where that fellow said the road turned.  It doesn’t turn.  Now, I vote we both get off our mules and decline to go a step farther.”

“All right,” Jack said.  “I shall know a good deal better what I am doing on my feet than I shall perched up here!”

The two boys at once slid off their mules to the ground.

“There is no turning there,” Hawtry said, turning to the hill.  “You have deceived us, and we won’t go a foot farther,” and turning, the lads started to walk back along the road they had come.