“Ay,” said I.  “Who is he?  He doesn’t look like a general of brigade.”

“Devil take me if I know.  Who will he be, Bill?”

Bill stared at the Frenchman blankly, and rooted him out of the dust with his toe.  “I wonder, now!  ’Picked him up, somewheres—­Get up, you little pig, and carry your liquor like a gentleman.  It was Mike intojuced him.”

“I did not,” said Mike.

“Very well, then, ye did not.  I must have come by him some other way.”

“It was yourself tripped over him in the cellar, up yandhar.”  He broke off and eyed me, meditating a sudden thought.  “It seems mighty queer, that—­speaking of a cellar as ‘up yandhar.’  Now a cellar, by rights, should be in the ground, under your fut.”

“And so it is,” argued Bill; “slap in the bowels of it.”

“Ah, be quiet wid your bowels!  As I was saying, sor, Bill tripped over the little fellow:  and the next I knew he was crying to be tuk home to camp, and Bill swearing to do it if it cost him his stripes.  And that is where I come into this fatigue job:  for the man’s no friend of mine, and will not be looking it, I hope.”

“Did I so?” Bill exclaimed, regarding himself suddenly from outside, as it were, and not without admiration.  “Did I promise that?  Well, then”—­he fixed a sternly disapproving stare on the Frenchman—­ “the Lord knows what possessed me; but to the bridgehead you go, if I fight the whole of Clausel’s division single-handed.  Take his feet, Mike; I’m a man of my word.  Hep!—­ready is it?  For’ard!”

For a minute or so, as they staggered down the road, I stared after them; and then upon an impulse mounted the track by which they had descended.

It was easy enough, or they had never come down alive; but the sun’s rays smote hotly off the face of the rock, and at one point I narrowly missed being brained by a stone dislodged by some drunkard above me.  Already, however, the stream of tipplers had begun to set back towards the camp, and my main difficulty was to steer against it, avoiding disputes as to the rule of the road.  I had no intention of climbing to the castle:  my whim was—­and herein again I set my training a test—­to walk straight to the particular opening from which, across the Zapardiel, I had seen my comedians emerge.

I found it, not without difficulty—­a broad archway of rock, so low that a man of ordinary stature must stoop to pass beneath it; with, for threshold, a sill of dry fine earth which sloped up to a ridge immediately beneath the archway, and on the inner side dipped down into darkness so abruptly that as I mounted on the outer side I found myself staring, at a distance of two yards or less, into the face of an old man seated within the cave, out of which his head and shoulders arose into view as if by magic.

“Ah!” said he calmly.  “Good evening, senor.  You will find good entertainment within.”  He pointed past him into absolute night, or so it seemed to my dazzled eyes.