A few days previously they had been chased by _El Aspirante_, a Spanish gun-boat, which gave them eight shots. One caught them on the port quarter, and shivered some timbers, but effected no more serious damage.
"I wish we had only an Armstrong twenty-four pounder close handy," said the mate, "and we'd have saved them 'ere dons the price of a coffin, I'd take my davy!"
From what I saw of the seamen, I think this was no empty boast. Some of them had served with one Captain Semmes on a certain craft called the _Alabama_, and had been picked up after the fight with the _Keasarge_, off Cherbourg, by Mr. John Lancaster's yacht, the _Deerhound_. There is no need for concealment now, so that I may freely admit that the _Deerhound_ and the _San Margarita_ were one and the same. Travers, who was in love with the yacht, told me if he had another blade to the screw he could give leg-bail to the fastest ship in the Spanish navy. At leaving, I was asked to take a trip with them; they were about to visit their floating arsenal in the Bay of Biscay, load, and try to run another cargo. I respectfully declined--fortunately for myself; my orders were to get to the Carlist headquarters, not to go playing Paul Jones.
Leader and Smith Sheehan were about to cross the border, and readily acceded to my request to form one of the party. We rose at daybreak next morning and looked out of window for the _San Margarita_. The roadstead of Socoa was a blank. She had steamed away during the night. After the customary chocolate we started blithely, in a light basket-carriage with a pair of fast-trotting ponies, that whisked us in less than two hours to the foot of the Pyrenees. Here we had to alight, the road up the mountain being impracticable for vehicles. A boy guide was in waiting to show us over the border by the smuggler's path--a wild short-cut through a labyrinth of brushwood. The guide was a remarkable youth in his way; he understood not a syllable of French or Spanish, and spoke only Basque which none of us comprehended, so that our parley with him was somewhat uninteresting. Yet I was anxious to elicit the opinions of that guide. A lad who could strike the path up the mountain with such truth might, by some instinct, have seen his way through Spanish politics. Our walk was a trial of endurance. I had traversed the Pyrenees in snow, and that was fatiguing enough in all conscience; but now the sun was beating cruelly on the parched herbage, and plodding up the ascent was like treading burning marl. I had to cry halt half-a-dozen times before we reached the summit; and yet that marvellous guide, with the baggage of all three on his head, kept on with a springy step and serene smile, like the youth in "Excelsior." It was an alternation of wheezing and stumbling with me, with a continuous ooze of perspiration, till I arrived heaving and panting on the crown of the ridge, and flung myself on the turf beside a pile of planking fresh from the woodcutter's axe. There was no further need to be wary, for this was Spain. We were over the border, and now my companions could breathe freely in every sense. Before they had passed the imaginary line they were liable to be arrested by the gendarmes, conducted back and interned, for they had that about their persons which betrayed that they were no innocent travellers. At every noise ahead, a scud was made to the cover of the tall ferns and brambles by the wayside, and an advance party of one was thrown out to reconnoitre. The precautions were superfluous, if we knew but all. From the 15th of July, the French patrols had got the hint to be blind. So lax was the cordon on the day we crossed, that a brigade of Carlists, each man with a repeating rifle on his shoulder and two revolvers in his belt, might have gone into Spain and never have had their sight offended by a solitary French uniform.