Yes, the battle was over, and he had conquered!  His position indeed was impregnable; had he been well supplied with food, he could have held it against hundreds of men for a long period.  But, as he laid down on his bed of seaweed, a rough tongue licked his hand.  It was his goat, Jannedik.  For the last fortnight, Rohan’s mother had sent the goat every day to her son with a basket of food tied round its neck and hidden in the long hair of its throat.  Rohan groped in the darkness for the basket, and Jannedik uttered a low cry of pain, rolled over at his feet into the moonlight, revealing a terrible bullet-wound in its side, and quivered and died.  Some soldier had shot it.

As Rohan stared at the dead body of his four-footed friend, the strength of mind which had enabled him to withstand all the power that Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe, could bring against him at last went from him.  Trembling and shivering, he looked around him, overcome by utter desolation and despair.  He had held out bravely, but he could hold out no longer; slowly and laboriously he climbed down the dark face of the precipice, and reached the narrow strip of shingle below, just as the moon got clear from a cloud and lighted up the cavern.  Its cold rays fell on the white face of the sergeant, who laid half on the shingle and half in the water, crushed by the great boulder with which Rohan had broken down the ladders.

Rohan gazed for a moment on the features of the man he had killed, and then, with a cry of agony and despair, he fell upon his knees.

“Not on my head, O God, be the guilt!” he prayed.  “Not on my head, but on his who hunted me down and made me what I am; on his, whose red sword shadows all the world, and drives on millions of innocent men to murder each other!  Ah, God, God, God!  The men that Napoleon has slain!  Is it not high time that some man like me sought him out and killed him, and brought peace back once more to this blood-covered earth of ours?  Yes, I will do it!”

Rising wildly to his feet, full of the strange strength and the strange powers of madness, Rohan Gwenfern climbed up the precipice to his bed of seaweed, and then took a path that no man had taken and lived—­the sheer, precipitous path from the roof of the cavern to the top of the cliff.

III.—­Rohan Meets Napoleon

As the Grand Army swept into Belgium for the last great battle against the united powers of England, Germany, Austria, and Russia, a strange, savage creature followed it—­a gaunt, half-naked man, with long yellow hair falling almost to his waist, and bloodshot eyes with a look of madness in them.  How he lived it is difficult to tell.  He never begged, but the soldiers threw lumps of bread at him as he prowled round their camp-fires, asking everyone whom he met:  “Where is the emperor?  Where is Napoleon?  Do you think he will come this way?”

Twice he had been arrested as a spy, and hastily condemned to be shot.  But each time, on hearing his sentence of death, he gave so strange a laugh that the officer examined him more closely, and then set him free, saying with scornful pity, “It is a harmless maniac.  Let him go.”