‘Not drunk, but dying,’ said he.  ’But thank Heaven that I have seen a French officer while I have still strength to speak.’

I laid him among the heather and poured some brandy down his throat.  All round us was the vast countryside, green and peaceful, with nothing living in sight save only the mutilated man beside me.

‘Who has done this?’ I asked, ’and what are you?  You are French, and yet the uniform is strange to me.’

’It is that of the Emperor’s new guard of honour.  I am the Marquis of Chateau St Arnaud, and I am the ninth of my blood who has died in the service of France.  I have been pursued and wounded by the night-riders of Lutzow, but I hid among the brushwood yonder, and waited in the hope that a Frenchman might pass.  I could not be sure at first if you were friend or foe, but I felt that death was very near, and that I must take the chance.’

‘Keep your heart up, comrade,’ said I; ’I have seen a man with a worse wound who has lived to boast of it.’

‘No, no,’ he whispered; ‘I am going fast.’  He laid his hand upon mine as he spoke, and I saw that his finger-nails were already blue.  ’But I have papers here in my tunic which you must carry at once to the Prince of Saxe-Felstein, at his Castle of Hof.  He is still true to us, but the Princess is our deadly enemy.  She is striving to make him declare against us.  If he does so, it will determine all those who are wavering, for the King of Prussia is his uncle and the King of Bavaria his cousin.  These papers will hold him to us if they can only reach him before he takes the last step.  Place them in his hands tonight, and, perhaps, you will have saved all Germany for the Emperor.  Had my horse not been shot, I might, wounded as I am——­’ He choked, and the cold hand tightened into a grip, which left mine as bloodless as itself.  Then, with a groan, his head jerked back, and it was all over with him.

Here was a fine start for my journey home.  I was left with a commission of which I knew little, which would lead me to delay the pressing needs of my hussars, and which at the same time was of such importance that it was impossible for me to avoid it.  I opened the Marquis’s tunic, the brilliance of which had been devised by the Emperor in order to attract those young aristocrats from whom he hoped to raise these new regiments of his Guard.  It was a small packet of papers which I drew out, tied up with silk, and addressed to the Prince of Saxe-Felstein.  In the corner, in a sprawling, untidy hand, which I knew to be the Emperor’s own, was written:  ‘Pressing and most important.’  It was an order to me, those four words—­an order as clear as if it had come straight from the firm lips with the cold grey eyes looking into mine.  My troopers might wait for their horses, the dead Marquis might lie where I had laid him amongst the heather, but if the mare and her rider had a breath left in them the papers should reach the Prince that night.