t hand as he gripped the cage,
and he dropped it as something with which he had no further concern.
As he turned away, hugging his hand, and cursing the marksman, a
second shot from another direction took the Brunswicker between the
shoulders.
At dawn he found himself on the ramparts by the Trinidad breach,
peering curiously among the slain. Across the top of the breach
stretched a heavy beam studded with sword blades, and all the bodies
on this side of it were French. Right beneath it lay one red-coat
whose skull had been battered out of shape as he attempted to wriggle
through. All the upper blades were stained, and on one fluttered a
strip of flannel shirt. Powder blackened every inch of the rampart
hereabouts, and as Nat passed over he saw the bodies piled in scores
on the glacis below--some hideously scorched---among beams, gabions,
burnt out fire-pots, and the wreckage of ladders. A horrible smell of
singed flesh rose on the morning air; and, beyond the stench and the
sullen smoke, birds sang in dewy fields, and the Guadiana flowed
between grey olives and green promise of harvest.
Below, a single British officer, wrapped in a dark cape, picked his
way among the corpses. Behind, intermittent shots and outcries told of
the sack in progress. Save for Nat and the dead, the Trinidad was a
desert. Yet he talked incessantly, and, stooping to pat the shoulder
of the red-coat beneath the _chevaux de frise_, spoke to Dave McInnes
and Teddy Butson to come and look. He never doubted they were beside
him. "Pretty mess they've made of this chap." He touched the man's
collar: "48th, a corporal! Ugh, let's get out of this!" In imagination
he linked arms with two men already stiffening, one at the foot and
the other on the summit of the San Vincent's bastion. "King's Own--all
friends in the King's Own!" he babbled as he retraced his way into the
town.
He had a firelock in his hands ... he was fumbling with it, very
clumsily, by reason of his shattered fingers. He had wandered down a
narrow street, and was groping at an iron-studded door. "Won't open,"
he told the ghosts beside him. "Must try the patent key." He put the
muzzle against the lock and fired, flung himself against the door, and
as it broke before him, stood swaying, staring across a whisp of
smoke into a mean room, where a priest knelt in one corner by a straw
pallet, and a girl rose from beside him and slowly confronted the
intruder. As she rose she caught at th
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