“Where?”

“In Sabugal; but it seems he was brought there from the main camp above Penamacor.  Trant tells me that you are not only namesakes but kinsmen.  Would you care to question the messenger?”

The messenger was brought in—­a peasant from the Penamacor district.  Out of his rambling tale one or two certainties emerged.  McNeill—­the celebrated McNeill—­was a prisoner; he had been taken on the 14th somewhere in the pass above Penamacor, and conveyed to Sabugal to await the French marshal’s return.  His servant was dead—­killed in trying to escape, or to help his master’s escape.  So much I sifted out of the mass of inaccuracies.  For, as usual, the two McNeills had managed to get mixed up in the story, a good half of which spread itself into a highly coloured version of my own escape from Sabugal on the evening of the 13th; how I had been arrested by a French officer in a back shop in the heart of the town; how, as he overhauled my incriminating papers, I had leapt on him with a knife and stabbed him to the heart, while my servant did the same with his orderly; how, having possessed ourselves of their clothes and horses, we had ridden boldly through the gate and southward to join Lord Wellington; and a great deal more equally veracious.  As I listened I began to understand how legends grow and demigods are made.

It was flattering; but without attempting to show how I managed to disengage the facts, I will here quote the plain account of them, sent to me long afterwards by Captain Alan himself:—­

Captain Alan McNeill’s Statement.

“You wish, for use in your Memoirs, an account of my capture in the month of April, 1811, and the death of my faithful servant, Jose.  I imagine this does not include an account of all our movements from the time you left us at Tammames (though this, too, I shall be happy to send if desired), and so I come at once to the 14th, the actual date of the capture.

“The preceding night we had spent in the woods below the great French camp, and perhaps a mile above the mouth of the pass opening on Penamacor.  All through the previous day there had been considerable stir in the camp, and I believed a general movement to be impending.  I supposed Marmont himself to be either with the main army or behind in his headquarters at Sabugal, and within easy distance.  It never occurred to me—­nor could it have occurred to any reasonable man—­to guess, upon no evidence, that a marshal of France had gone gallivanting with six thousand horse and two brigades of infantry in chase of a handful of undrilled militia.

“My impression was that his move, if he made one, would be a resolute descent through Penamacor and upon Castello Branco.  As a matter of fact, although Victor Alten had abandoned that place to be held by Lecor and his two thousand five hundred militiamen, the French (constant to their policy of frittering away opportunities) merely sent down two detachments of cavalry to menace it, and I believe that my capture was the only success which befel them.