in all—­in the ramshackle stable in the court-yard facing the inn; and since (as my master explained to me the first morning) it was a tradition of the posada to combine the duties of tapster and ostler in one person, I found all the exercise I needed in running between the cellar and the great kitchen, and between the kitchen and the stable, where the troopers had always a job for me, and allowed me in return to join in their talk.  They seemed to think this an adequate reward, and I did not grumble.

Now, beside the stable, and divided from it by a midden-heap, there stood at the back of the inn a small outhouse with a loft.  This in more prosperous days had accommodated the master’s own mule, but now was stored with empty barrels, strings of onions, and trusses of hay—­which last had been hastily removed from the larger stable when the troopers took possession.  Here I slept by night, for lack of room indoors, and also to guard the fodder—­an arrangement which suited me admirably, since it left me my own master for six or seven hours of the twenty-four.  My bedroom furniture consisted of a truss of hay, a lantern, a tinder-box, and a rusty fowling piece.  For my toilet I went to the bucket in the stable yard.

On the fifth night, having some particular information to send to headquarters, I made a cautious expedition to the place agreed upon with my messenger—­a fairly intelligent muleteer, and honest, but new to the business.  We met in the garden at the rear of his cottage, conveniently approached by way of the ill-kept cemetery which stood at the end of the village.  If surprised, I was to act the nocturnal lover, and he the angry defender of his sister’s reputation—­a foolish but not ill-looking girl, to whom I had confided nothing beyond a few amorous glances, so that her evidence (if unluckily needed) might carry all the weight of an obvious incapacity to invent or deceive.

These precautions proved unnecessary.  But my muleteer, though plucky, was nervous, and I had to repeat my instructions at least thrice in detail before I felt easy.  Also he brought news of a fresh movement of battalions behind Huerta, and of a sentence in the latest General Order affecting my own movements, and this obliged me to make some slight alteration in my original message.  So that, what with one thing and another, it wanted but an hour of dawn when I regained the yard of the Posada del Rio and cautiously re-entered the little granary.

Rain had fallen during the night—­two or three short but heavy showers.  Creeping on one’s belly between the damp graves of a cemetery is not the pleasantest work in the world, and I was shivering with wet and cold and an instant want of sleep.  But as I closed the door behind me and turned to grope for the ladder to my sleeping loft, I came to a halt, suddenly and painfully wide awake.  There was someone in the granary.  In the pitch darkness my ear caught the sound of breathing—­of someone standing absolutely still and checking his breath within a few paces of me—­perhaps six, perhaps less.