THE LIVING SPECTRE
In part, his explanation of himself was straightforward and satisfactory. What he told about the regiment to which he belonged was known to be true; and equally known to be true was much of what he told—being in accord with the news brought thence by the latest galleon—about affairs in the Filipinas. But when it came to explaining the main matter—how he had been shifted across the ocean and the earth, and all in a single moment, from his guard-mount before the Governor's Palace in Manila to his guard-mount before the Viceroy's Palace in the City of Mexico—Gil Pérez was at a stand. How that strange thing had happened, he said, he knew no more than Don Luis himself knew. All that he could be sure of was that it had happened: because, certainly, only a half hour earlier he had been in Manila; and now, just as certainly, he was in the City of Mexico—as his lordship the Viceroy could see plainly with his own eyes. As to the even greater marvel—how he knew that on the previous evening the Governor of the Filipinas had had his head murderously split open, and was dead of it, in the Molucca Islands—he said quite freely
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