ding Nat's Company, but now
in charge of the stormers. A voice hailed him, and he ran back. "Yes,
sir, I think so decidedly," Nat heard him saying, and he came running
clutching his sword sheath. "Silence men--the brigade will advance."

The Portuguese picked up and shouldered their ladders: the orders were
given, and the columns began to move down the slope. For a while they
could hear the tramp of the other brigade moving parallel with them on
the other side of the knoll, then fainter and fainter as it wheeled
aside and down the gorge to the right. At the foot of the slope they
opened a view up the gorge lit for a moment by a flare burning on the
ramparts of the Pardaleras, and saw their comrades moving down and
across the bottom like a stream of red lava pouring towards the foot.
The flare died down and our brigade struck away to the left over the
level country. On this side Badajos remained dark and silent.

They were marching quickly, yet the pace did not satisfy Nat. He
wanted to be through with it, to come face to face with the worst
and know it. And yet he feared it abominably. For two years he had
contrived to hide his secret. He had marched, counter-marched, fed,
slept, and fought with his comrades; had dodged with them behind
cover, loaded, fired, charged with them; had behaved outwardly like a
decent soldier, but almost always with a sickening void in the pit of
the stomach. Once or twice in particularly bad moments he had caught
himself blubbering, and with a deadly shame. He had not an idea that
at least a dozen of his comrades--among them Dave and Teddy--had seen
it, and thought nothing of it; still less did he imagine that those
had been his most courageous moments. Soldiers fight differently.
Teddy Butson, for instance, talked all the time until his tongue
swelled, and then he barked like a dog. Dave shut his teeth and
groaned. But these symptoms escaped Nat, whose habit was to think all
the while of himself. Of one thing he felt sure, that he had never yet
been anything but glad to hear the recall sounded.

Well, so far he had escaped. Heaven knew how he had managed it; he
only knew that the last two years had been as long as fifty, and he
seemed to have been living since the beginning of the world. But here
he was, and actually keeping step with a storming party. He kept his
eyes on Dave's long lean back immediately in front and trudged on,
divided between an insane desire to know of what Dave was t