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I can hardly describe the effect of this ridiculous adventure upon my nerves. My heart sank whenever a plethoric customer entered the shop, and I caught fright or snatched relief even from the weight of a footfall or the size of a shadow in my doorway. A dozen times in intervals of leisure I reached down the bottle from its shelf and studied my one remaining leech. A horrible suspicion possessed me that the little brute was dead. He remained at any rate completely torpid, though I coaxed him almost in agony to show some sign of life. Obviously the bottle contained nothing to nourish him; to offer him my own blood would be to disable him for another patient. On the fourth afternoon I went so far as to try him on the back of my hand. I waited five minutes; he gave no sign. Then, startled by a footstep outside, I popped him hurriedly back in his bottle.

A scraggy, hawk-nosed trooper of hussars entered and flung himself into my chair demanding a shave. In my confusion I had lathered his chin and set to work before giving his face any particular attention. He had started a grumble at being overworked (he was just off duty and smelt potently of the stable), but sat silent as men usually do at the first scrape of the razor. On looking down I saw in a flash that this was not the reason. He was one of the troopers whose odd jobs I had done at the Posada del Rio in Huerta, an ill-conditioned Norman called Michu–Pierre Michu. Since our meeting, with the help of a little walnut juice, I had given myself a fine Portuguese complexion with other small touches sufficient to deceive a cleverer man. But by ill-luck (or to give it a true name, by careless folly) I had knotted under my collar that morning a yellow-patterned handkerchief which I had worn every day at the Posada del Rio, and as his eyes travelled from this to my face I saw that the man recognised me.

There was no time for hesitating. If I kept silence, no doubt he would do the same; but if I let him go, it would be to make straight for headquarters with his tale. I scraped away for a second or two in dead silence, and then holding my razor point I said, sharp and low, “I am going to kill you.”

He turned white as a sheet, opened his mouth, and I could feel him gathering his muscles together to heave himself out of the chair; no easy matter. I laid the flat of the razor against his flesh, and he sank back helpless. My hand was over his mouth. “Yes, I shall have plenty of time before they find you.” A sound in his throat was the only answer, something between a grunt and a sob. “To be sure” I went on, “I bear you no grudge. But there is no other way, unless–“

“No, no,” he gasped. “I promise. The grave shall not be more secret.”

“Ah,” said I, “but how am I to believe that?”

“Parole d’honneur.”

“I must have even a little more than that.” I made him swear by the faith of a soldier and half-a-dozen other oaths which occurred to me as likely to bind him if, lacking honour and religion, he might still have room in his lean body for a little superstition. He took every oath eagerly, and with a pensive frown I resumed my shaving. At the first scrape he winced and tried to push me back.

“Indeed no,” said I; “business is business,” and I finished the job methodically, relentlessly. It still consoles me to think upon what he must have suffered.

When at length I let him up he forced an uneasy laugh. “Well, comrade, you had the better of me I must say. Eh! but you’re a clever one–and at Huerta, eh?” He held out his hand. “No rancour though–a fair trick of war, and I am not the man to bear a grudge for it. After all war’s war, as they say. Some use one weapon, some another. You know,” he went on confidentially, “it isn’t as if you had learnt anything out of me. In that case–well, of course, it would have made all the difference.”