brawn in the chair, so full of animal life and rude health—­no, strike at random I could not!  I took his arm and asked insinuatingly, “Now, where do you usually have it done?” “Sometimes here, sometimes there,” he answered.  Joy!  I remembered a bottle of leeches on the shelf.  I felt the man’s pulse and lifted his eyelids with trembling fingers.  “In your state,” said I, “it would be a crime to bleed you.  What you want is leeches.”  “You think so?” he asked—­“how many?” “Oh, half-a-dozen—­to begin with.”  In my sweating hurry I forgot (if I had ever known) that the bottle contained but three.  “No,” said I, “we’ll start with a couple and work up by degrees.”  He took them on his palm and turned them over with a stubby forefinger.  “Funny little beasts!” said he and marched out of the shop into the sunshine.  To this day when recounting his Peninsular exploits he omits his narrowest escape.

I can hardly describe the effect of this ridiculous adventure upon my nerves.  My heart sank whenever a plethoric customer entered the shop, and I caught fright or snatched relief even from the weight of a footfall or the size of a shadow in my doorway.  A dozen times in intervals of leisure I reached down the bottle from its shelf and studied my one remaining leech.  A horrible suspicion possessed me that the little brute was dead.  He remained at any rate completely torpid, though I coaxed him almost in agony to show some sign of life.  Obviously the bottle contained nothing to nourish him; to offer him my own blood would be to disable him for another patient.  On the fourth afternoon I went so far as to try him on the back of my hand.  I waited five minutes; he gave no sign.  Then, startled by a footstep outside, I popped him hurriedly back in his bottle.

A scraggy, hawk-nosed trooper of hussars entered and flung himself into my chair demanding a shave.  In my confusion I had lathered his chin and set to work before giving his face any particular attention.  He had started a grumble at being overworked (he was just off duty and smelt potently of the stable), but sat silent as men usually do at the first scrape of the razor.  On looking down I saw in a flash that this was not the reason.  He was one of the troopers whose odd jobs I had done at the Posada del Rio in Huerta, an ill-conditioned Norman called Michu—­Pierre Michu.  Since our meeting, with the help of a little walnut juice, I had given myself a fine Portuguese complexion with other small touches sufficient to deceive a cleverer man.  But by ill-luck (or to give it a true name, by careless folly) I had knotted under my collar that morning a yellow-patterned handkerchief which I had worn every day at the Posada del Rio, and as his eyes travelled from this to my face I saw that the man recognised me.

There was no time for hesitating.  If I kept silence, no doubt he would do the same; but if I let him go, it would be to make straight for headquarters with his tale.  I scraped away for a second or two in dead silence, and then holding my razor point I said, sharp and low, “I am going to kill you.”