n 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