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“What the devil do you want here?” demanded the lieutenant roughly in bad Portuguese. “But, hallo!” he added, recognising me, and turned a curious glance on the other.

“Who is it?” the staff officer asked.

“It’s a barber; and I believe something of a surgeon. That’s so, eh?” He appealed to me.

“In a small way,” I answered apologetically.

The lieutenant turned again to his companion. “He might do for us; the sooner the better, unless–“

“Unless,” interrupted the staff officer with cold politeness, “you prefer the apology you owe me.”

The lieutenant swung round again with a brusque laugh. “Look here, have you your instruments about you?”

For answer I held up my bottle with the one absurd leech dormant at the bottom. He laughed again just as harshly.

“That is about the last thing to suit our purpose. Listen”–he glanced out through the passage–“the gates won’t be shut for an hour yet. It will take you perhaps twenty minutes to fetch what is necessary. You understand? Return here, and don’t keep us waiting. Afterwards, should the gates be shut, one of us will see you back to the town.”

I bowed without a word and hurried back across the water meadow. Along the river bank between the patrols the anglers still sat in their patient row. And on the road to the north-west the tail of the second brigade was winding slowly out of sight.

Once past the gate and through the streets, I walked more briskly, paused at my shop door to fit the key in the lock, and was astonished when the door fell open at the push of my hand.

Then in an instant I understood. The shop had been ransacked–by that treacherous scoundrel Michu, of course. Bottles, herbs, shaving apparatus all was topsy-turvy. Drawers stood half-open; the floor was in a litter.

I had two consolations: the first that there were no incriminating papers in the, house; the second that Michu had clearly paid me a private visit before carrying his tale to headquarters. Otherwise the door would have been sealed and the house under guard. I reflected that the idiot would catch it hot for this unauthorised piece of work. Stay! he might still be in the house rummaging the upper rooms. I crept upstairs.

No, he was gone. He had left my case of instruments, too, after breaking the lock and scattering them about the floor. I gathered them together in haste, descended again, snatched up a roll of lint, and pausing only at the door for a glance up and down the street, made my escape post haste for the water meadow.

In the patio I found the two disputants standing much as I had left them, the staff officer gently and methodically smoothing his horse’s crupper, the lieutenant with a watch in his hand.

“Good,” said he, closing it with a snap, “seventeen minutes only. By the way, do you happen to understand French?”

“A very little,” said I.

“Because, as you alone are the witness of this our little difference, it will be in order if I explain that I insulted this gentleman.”

“Somewhat grossly,” put in the staff officer.

“Somewhat grossly, in return for an insult put upon me–somewhat grossly–in the presence of my company, two days ago, in the camp above Penamacor, when I took the liberty to resent a message conveyed by him to my colonel–as he alleges upon the authority of the marshal, the Duke of Ragusa.”

“An assertion,” commented the staff officer, “which I am able to prove on the marshal’s return and with his permission, provided always that the request be decently made.”

They had been speaking in French and meanwhile removing their tunics. The staff officer had even drawn off his riding boots. “Do you understand?” asked the lieutenant.

“A little,” said I; “enough to serve the occasion.”

“Excellent barber-surgeon! Would that all your nation were no more inquisitive!” He turned to the staff officer. “Ready? On guard, then, monsieur!”

The combat was really not worth describing. The young staff officer had indeed as much training as his opponent (and that was little), but no wrist at all. He had scarcely engaged before he attempted a blind cut over the scalp. The lieutenant, parrying clumsily, but just in time, forced blade and arm upward until the two pointed almost vertically to heaven, and their forearms almost rubbed as the pair stood close and chest to chest. For an instant the staff officer’s sword was actually driven back behind his head; and then with a rearward spring the lieutenant disengaged and brought his edge clean down on his adversary’s left shoulder and breast, narrowly missing his ear. The cut itself, delivered almost in the recoil, had no great weight behind it, but the blood spurted at once, and the wounded man, stepping back for a fresh guard, swayed foolishly for a moment and then toppled into my arms.