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The Spaniard eyed me suspiciously.

“Of course,” said I, reading his thoughts, “if your master doubts me–“

“I think, Senor McNeill, I have given you no cause to suspect it,” the Captain gravely interrupted. “There is, however, one question I should like to ask, if I may do so without offence. Is it your intention that I should cross in the darkness or wait for daylight?”

“We must wait for daylight; because although it increases some obvious dangers–“

“Excuse me; your reasons are bound to be good ones. I will fetch around my horse at once, and we shall expect you back here in five minutes.”

In five minutes time I returned to find them standing in the darkness outside the granary door. Jose had strewn a space round about with hay; but at my command he fetched more and spread it carefully, step by step, as Captain McNeill led his horse forward. My own arms were full; for I had spent the five minutes in collecting a score of French blankets and shirts off the hedges, where the regimental washermen had spread them the day before to dry.

The sketch on the following page will explain my plan and our movements better than a page of explanation:–

The reader will observe that the Posada del Rio, which faces inwards upon its own courtyard, thrusts out upon the river at its rear a gable which overhangs the stream and flanks its small waterside garden from view of the village street. Into this garden, where the soldiers were used to sit and drink their wine of an evening, I led the Captain, whispering him to keep silence, for eight of the Frenchmen slept behind the windows above. In the corner by the gable was an awning, sufficient, when cleared of stools and tables, to screen him and his horse from any eyes looking down from these windows, though not tall enough to allow him to mount. And at daybreak, when the battalion assembled at its alarm-post above the ford, the gable itself would hide him. But of course the open front of the garden–where in two places the bank shelved easily down to the water–would leave him in full view of the troopers across the river. It was for this that I had brought the blankets. Across the angle by the gable there ran a clothes line on which the house-servant, Mercedes, hung her dish-clouts to dry. Unfastening the inner end, I brought it forward and lashed it to a post supporting a dovecote on the river wall. To fasten it high enough I had to climb the post, and this set the birds moving uneasily in the box overhead. But before their alarm grew serious I had slipped down to earth again, and now it took Jose and me but a couple of minutes to fling the blankets over the line and provide the Captain with a curtain, behind which, when day broke, he could watch the troopers and his opportunity. Already, in the village behind us, a cock was crowing. In twenty minutes the sun would be up and the bugles sounding the reveille. “Down the bank by the gable,” I whispered. “It runs shallow there, and six or seven yards to the right you strike the ford. When the vedettes are separated–just before they turn to come back–that’s your time.”

I took Jose by the arm. “We may as well be there to see. How were you planning to cross?”

“Oh,” said he, “a marketer–with a raw-boned Galician horse and two panniers of eggs–for Arapiles–“

“That will do; but you must enter the village at the farther end and come down the road to the ford. Get your horse”–we crept back to the granary together–“but wait a moment, and I will show you the way round.”

When I rejoined him at the back of the granary he had his horse ready, and we started to work around the village. But I had miscalculated the time. The sky was growing lighter, and scarcely were we in the lane behind the courtyard before the bugles began to sound.