Part 13

Ahead of them, on the far side of the ravine, loomed a mountain white from base to summit save where a scarp of sheer cliff had allowed but a powder of snow to cling or, settling in the fissures, to cross-hatch the wrinkles of its forbidding face. A stream, hidden far out of sight by the near wall of the ravine, chattered aloud as it swept around the mountain's base on a sharp curve, rattling the boulders in its bed. During the first part of the descent mists and snow-wreaths concealed even the lip of the chasm through which this noisy water poured; but as the leading regiment neared it, the snowstorm lifted, the clouds parted, and a shaft of wintry sunshine pierced the valley, revealing a bridge of many arches. For the moment it seemed a fairy bridge spanning gulfs of nothingness; next--for it stood aslant to the road--its narrow archways appeared as so many portals, tall and cavernous, admitting to the bowels of the mountain. But beyond it the road resumed its zig-zags, plainly traceable on the snow. The soldiers, as they neared the bridge, grunted their disapproval of these zig-zags beyond it. A few lifted their muskets and took imaginary aim, as much as to say, "That's how the French from here will pick us off as we mount yonder."

The General had been the first to perceive this, and ran his forces briskly across the bridge--his guns first, then his infantry at the double. He found a party of engineers at work on the farther arches, preparing to destroy them as soon as the British were over; but ordered them to desist and make their way out of danger with all speed. For the stream--as a glance told him--was fordable both above and below the bridge, and they were wasting their labour. Moreover, arches of so narrow a span could be easily repaired.

Engineers, therefore, and artillery and infantry together pressed briskly up the exposed gradients, and were halted just beyond musket-shot from the bank opposite, having suffered little on the way from the few French voltigeurs who had arrived in time to fire with effect. Though beyond their range, the British position admirably commanded the bridge and the bridge-head; and Paget, warming to his work and willing to give tit-for-tat after hours of harassment, devised an open insult for his pursuers.

He ordered the guns to be unlimbered and their horses to be led out of sight. Then, regiment by regiment, he sent his division onward--20th, 52nd, 91st, and Rifles--pausing only at his trusted 28th, whom he proceeded to post with careful inconspicuousness; the light company behind a low fence in flank of the guns and commanding the bridge, the grenadiers about a hundred yards behind them, and the battalion companies yet a little further to the rear. While the 28th thus disposed themselves, the rest of the division moved off, leaving the guns to all appearance abandoned. The General spread his greatcoat, and seating himself on the slope behind the light company, cheerfully helped himself to snuff from the pocket of his buff-leather waistcoat. Meanwhile the sky had been clearing steadily, and the sunshine, at first so feeble, fell on the slope with almost summer warmth. The 28th, under the lee of the mountain-cliffs, looked up and saw white clouds chasing each other across deep gulfs of blue, looked down and saw the noon rays glinting on their enemy's accoutrements beyond the bridge-head. The French were gathering fast, but could not yet make up their minds to assault.

"Our friends," said the General, pouring himself a drink from his pocket-flask, "don't seem in a hurry to add to their artillery."

The men of the light company, standing near him, laughed as they munched their rations. For three days they had plodded through snow and sleet with hot hearts, nursing their Commander-in-Chief's reproof at Calcabellos: "You, 28th, are not the men you used to be. You are no longer the regiment who to a man fought by my side in Egypt!" So Moore had spoken, and ridden off contemptuously, leaving the words to sting. They not only stung, but rankled; for to the war-cry of "Remember Egypt!" the 28th always went into action: and they had been rebuked in the presence of Paget, now their General of Division, but once their Colonel, and the very man under whom they had won their proudest title, "the Backplates." It was Paget who, when once in Egypt the regiment had to meet two simultaneous attacks, in front and rear, had faced his rear rank about and gloriously repulsed both charges.

At the moment of Moore's reproof Paget had said nothing, and he made no allusion to it now. But the 28th understood. They knew why he had posted them alone here, and why he remained to watch. He was giving them a splendid chance, if a forlorn one. In the recovered sunshine their hearts warmed to him.

Unhappily, the French did not seem disposed to walk into the trap. Their fire slackened--from the first it had not been serious--and they loitered by the bridge-end awaiting reinforcements. Yet from time to time they pushed small parties across the fords above and below the bridge; and at length Paget sent a young subaltern up to the crest of the ridge on his flank, to see how many had collected thus on the near side of the stream. The subaltern reported--"Two or three hundred."

By this time the 28th had been posted for an hour or more; time enough to give the main body of the reserve a start of four miles. General Paget consulted his watch, returned it to his fob, and ordered the guns to be horsed again. As the artillerymen led their horses forward, he turned to the infantry, eyed their chapfallen faces, and composedly took snuff.

"Twenty-eighth, if you don't get fighting enough it's not my fault."

This was all he said, but it went to the men's hearts. "You'll give us another chance, Sir?" answered one or two. He had given them back already some of their old self-esteem, and if they were disappointed of a scrimmage, so was he.

But it would never do, since the French shirked a direct attack, to linger and be turned in flank by the numbers crossing the fords. So, having horsed his guns and sent them forward to overtake the reserve, Paget ordered the 28th to quit their position and resume the march.

No sooner were they in motion than the enemy's leading column began to pour across the bridge; its light companies, falling in with the scattered troops from the fords, pressed down upon the British rear; and the 28th took up once more the Parthian game in which they were growing expert. For three miles along the climbing road they marched, faced about for a skirmish, drove back their pursuers, and marched forward again, always in good order; the enemy being encumbered by its cavalry, which, useless from the first in this rough and wavering track, at length became an impediment and a serious peril. It was by fairly stampeding a troop back upon the foot-soldiers following that the British in the end checked the immediate danger, and, hurrying forward unmolested for a couple of miles, gained a new position in which they could not easily be assailed. The road here wound between a line of cliffs and a precipice giving a sheer drop into the ravine; and here, without need of flankers or, indeed, possibility of using them, the rearmost (light) company, halted for a while and faced about.

This brought their right shoulders round to the precipice, at the foot of which, and close upon three hundred feet below, a narrow plateau (or so it seemed) curved around the rock-face. The French, held at check, and once more declining a frontal attack, detached a body of cavalry and voltigeurs to follow this path in the hope of turning one flank. But a week's snow had smoothed over the true contour of the valley, and this apparent plateau proved to be but a gorge piled to its brim with drifts, in which men and horses plunged and sank until, repenting, they had much ado to extricate themselves.

On the ledge over their heads a young subaltern of the 28th--the same that Paget had sent to count the numbers crossing the fords--was looking down and laughing, when a pompous voice at his elbow inquired--

"Pray, Sir, where is General Paget?"

The subaltern, glancing up quickly, saw, planted on horseback before him, with legs astraddle, a podgy, red-faced man in a blue uniform buttoned to the chin. The General himself happened to be standing less than five yards away, resting his elbows on the wall of the road while he scanned the valley and the struggling Frenchmen through his glass: and the subaltern, knowing that he must have heard the question, for the moment made no reply.

"Be so good as to answer at once, Sir? Where is General Paget?"

The General closed his glass leisurably and came forward.

"I am General Paget, Sir--at your commands."

"Oh--ah--er, I beg pardon," said the little blue-coated man, slewing about in his saddle. "I am Paymaster-General, and--er--the fact is----"

"Paymaster-General?" echoed Paget in a soft and musing tone, as if deliberately searching his memory.

"Assistant," the little man corrected.

"Get down from your horse, Sir."

"I beg pardon----"

"Get down from your horse."

The Assistant-Paymaster clambered off. His vanity was wounded and he showed it; the mottles on his face deepened to crimson. "Beg pardon--ceremony--hardly an occasion--treasure of the army in danger."

Paget eyed him calmly, but with a darkening at the corner of the eye; a sign which the watching subaltern knew to be ominous.

"Be a little more explicit, if you please."

"The treasure, Sir, for which I am responsible----"

"Yes? How much?"

"I am not sure that I ought----"

"How much?"

"If you press the question, Sir, it might be twenty-five thousand pounds. I should not have mentioned it in the hearing of your men----" he hesitated.

The General concluded his sentence for him. "--Had not your foresight placed it in safety and out of their reach: that's understood. Well, Sir,--what then?"

"But, on the contrary, General, it is in imminent peril! The carts conveying it have stuck fast, not a mile ahead: the bullocks are foundered and cannot proceed; and I have ridden back to request that you supply me with fresh animals."

"Look at me, Sir, and then pray look about you."

"I beg your pardon----"

"You ought to. Am I a bullock-driver, Sir, or a muleteer? And in this country"--with a sharp wave of his hand--"can I breed full-grown mules or bullocks at a moment's notice to repair your d----d incompetence? Or, knowing me, have you the assurance to tell me coolly that you have lost--yes, lost--the treasure committed to you?--to confess that you, who ought to be a day's march ahead of the main body, are hanging back upon the rearmost company of the rearguard?--and come to me whining when that company is actually engaged with the enemy? Look, Sir"--and it seemed to some of the 28th that their General mischievously prolonged his address to give the Assistant-Paymaster a taste of rearguard work, for Soult's heavy columns were by this time pressing near to the entrance of the defile--"Observe the kind of strife in which we have been engaged since dawn; reflect that our tempers must needs be short; and congratulate yourself that, if this mountain be bare of fresh bullocks, it also fails to supply a handy tree."

The little man waited no longer on the road, along which French bullets were beginning to whistle, but clambered on his horse, and galloped off with hunched shoulders to rejoin his carts.

The rearguard, galled now by musketry and finding that, for all their floundering, the enemy were creeping past the rocky barrier below, retired in good order but briskly, and so, in about twenty minutes, overtook the two treasure-carts and their lines of exhausted cattle. Plainly this procession had come to the end of its powers and could not budge: and as plainly the officers in charge of it were at loggerheads. Paget surveyed the scene, his brow darkening thunderously: for, of the guns he had sent forward to overtake the reserve, two stood planted to protect the carts, and the artillery-captain in charge of them was being harangued by the fuming Assistant-Paymaster, while the actual guard of the treasure--a subaltern's party of the 4th (King's Own)--stood watching the altercation in surly contempt. Now the 28th and the King's Own were old friends, having been brigaded together through the early days of the campaign. As Paget rode forward they exchanged hilarious grins.

"Pray, Sir," he addressed the artilleryman, "why are you loitering here when ordered to overtake the main body with all speed? And what are you discussing with this person?"

"The Colonel, Sir, detached me at this officer's request."

"Hey?" Paget swung round on the Assistant-Paymaster. "You _dared_ to interfere with an order of mine? And, having done so, you forbore to tell me, just now, the extent of your impudence!"

"But--but the bullocks can go no farther!" stammered the poor man.

"And if so, who is responsible? Are _you, Sir_?" Paget demanded suddenly of the subaltern.

"No, General," the young man answered, saluting. "I beg to say that as far back as Nogales I pointed out the condition of these beasts, and also where in that place fresh animals were to be found: but I was bidden to hold my tongue."

"Do you admit this?" Paget swung round again upon the Assistant-Paymaster.

"Upon my word, Sir," the poor man tried to bluster, "I am not to be cross-examined in this fashion. I do not belong to the reserve, and I take my orders----"

"Then what the devil are you doing here? And how is it I catch you ordering my reserve about? By the look of it, a moment ago you were even attempting to teach my horse-artillery its business."

"He was urging me, Sir," said the artillery-captain grimly, "to abandon my guns and hitch my teams on to his carts."

The General's expression changed, and he bent upon the little man in blue a smile that was almost caressing. "I beg your pardon, Sir: it appears that I have quite failed to appreciate you."

"Do not mention it, Sir. You see, with a sum of twenty-five thousand pounds at stake----"

"And your reputation."

"To be sure, and my reputation; though that, I assure you, was less in my thoughts. With all this at stake----"

"Say rather 'lost.' I am going to pitch it down the mountain."

"But it is money!" almost screamed the little man.

"So are shot and shells. Twenty-eighth, forward, and help the guard to overturn the carts!"

Even the soldiers were staggered for a moment by this order. Impossible as they saw it to be to save the treasure, they were men; and the instinct of man revolts from pouring twenty-five thousand pounds over a precipice. They approached, unstrapped the tarpaulin covers, and feasted their eyes on stacks of silver Spanish dollars.

"You cannot mean it, Sir! I hold you responsible----" Speech choked the Assistant-Paymaster, and he waved wild arms in dumbshow.

But the General did mean it. At a word from him the artillerymen stood to their guns, and at another word the fatigue party of the 28th climbed off the carts, put their shoulders to the wheels and axle-trees, and with a heave sent the treasure over in a jingling avalanche. A few ran and craned their necks to mark where it fell: but the cliffs just here were sharply undercut, and everywhere below spread deep drifts to receive and cover it noiselessly. After the first rush and slide no sound came up from the depths into which it had disappeared. The men strained their ears to listen. They were listening still when, with a roar, the two guns behind them spoke out, hurling their salutation into Soult's advance guard as it swung into view around the corner of the road.

II

In a mud-walled hut perched over the brink of the ravine and sheltered there by a shelving rock, an old Gallegan peasant sat huddled over a fire and face to face with starvation. The fire, banked in the centre of the earthen floor, filled all the cabin with smoke, which escaped only by a gap in the thatch and a window-hole overlooking the ravine. An iron crock, on a chain furred with soot, hung from the rafters, where sooty cobwebs, a foot and more in length, waved noiselessly in the draught. It was empty, but he had no strength to lift it off its hook; and at the risk of cracking it he had piled up the logs on the hearth, for the cold searched his old bones. The window-hole showed a patch of fading day, wintry and sullen: but no beam of it penetrated within, where the firelight flickered murkily on three beds of dirty straw, a table like a butcher's block, and, at the back of the hut, an alcove occupied by three sooty dolls beneath a crucifix--the Virgin, St. Joseph, and St. James.

The alcove was just a recess scooped out of the _adobe_ wall: and the old man himself could not have told why his house had been built of unbaked mud when so much loose stone lay strewn about the mountain-side ready to hand. Possibly even his ancestors, who had built it, could not have told. They had come from the plain-land near Zamora, and built in the only fashion they knew--a fashion which _their_ ancestors had learnt from the Moors: but time and the mountain's bad habit of dropping stones had taught them to add a stout roof. For generations they had clung to this perch, and held body and soul together by the swine-herding. They pastured their pigs three miles below, where the ravine opened upon a valley moderately fertile and wooded with oak and chestnut; and in midwinter drove them back to the hill and styed them in a large pen beside the hut, in which, if the pen were crowded, they made room for the residue.

The family now consisted of the old man, Gil Chaleco (a widower and past work); his son Gil the Younger, with a wife, Juana; their only daughter, Mercedes, her young husband, Sebastian May, and their two-year-old boy. The two women worked with the men in herding the swine and were given sole charge of them annually, when Gil the Younger and Sebastian tramped it down to the plains and hired themselves out for the harvest.

But this year Sebastian, instead of harvesting, had departed for Corunna to join the insurrectionary bands and carry a gun in defence of his country. To Gil the Elder this was a piece of youthful folly. How could it matter, in this valley of theirs, what King reigned in far-away Madrid? And would a Spaniard any more than a Corsican make good the lost harvest-money? The rest of the family had joined him in raising objections; for in this den of poverty the three elders thought of money morning, noon, and night, and of nothing but money; and Mercedes was young and in love with her husband, and sorely unwilling to lend him to the wars. Sebastian, however, had smiled and kissed her and gone his way; and at the end of his soldiery had found himself, poor lad, in hospital in Leon, one of the many hundreds abandoned by the Marquis of Romana to the French.

News of this had not reached the valley, where indeed his wife's family had other trouble to concern them: for a forage party from the retreating British main guard had descended upon the cabin four days ago and carried off all the swine, leaving in exchange some scraps of paper, which (they said) would be honoured next day by the Assistant-Paymaster: he could not be more than a day's march behind. But a day had passed, and another, and now the household had gone off to Nogales to meet him on the road, leaving only the old man, and taking even little Sebastianillo. The pigs would be paid for handsomely by the rich English; Juana had some purchases to make in the town; and Mercedes needed to buy a shawl for the child, and thought it would be a treat for him to see the tall foreign red-coats marching past.

So they had started, leaving the old man with a day's provision (for the foragers had cleared the racks and the larder as well as the sty), and promising to be home before nightfall. But two days and a night had passed without news of them.

With his failing strength he had made shift to keep the fire alight; but food was not to be found. He had eaten his last hard crust of millet-bread seven or eight hours before, and this had been his only breakfast. His terror for the fate of the family was not acute. Old age had dulled his faculties, and he dozed by the fire with sudden starts of wakefulness, blinking his smoke-sored eyes and gazing with a vague sense of evil on the straw beds and the image in the alcove. His thoughts ran on the swine and the price to be paid for them by the Englishman: they faded into dreams wherein the family saints stepped down from their shrine and chaffered with the foreign paymaster; dreams in which he found himself grasping silver dollars with both hands. And all the while he was hungry to the point of dying; yet the visionary dollars brought no food--suggested only the impulse to bury them out of sight of thieves.

So vivid was the dream that, waking with a start and a shiver, he hobbled towards the window-hole and stopped to pick up the wooden shutter that should close it. Standing so, still half asleep, with his hand on the shutter-bar, he heard a rushing sound behind him, as though the mountain-side were breaking away overhead and rushing down upon the roof and back of the cabin.

He had spent all his life on these slopes and knew the sounds of avalanche and land-slips--small land-slips in this Gallegan valley were common enough. This noise resembled both, yet resembled neither, and withal was so terrifying that he swung round to face it, aquake in his shoes--to see the rear wall bowing inwards and crumbling, and the roof quietly subsiding upon it, as if to bury him alive.

For a moment he saw it as the mirror of his dream, cracking and splitting; then, as the image of the Virgin tilted itself forward from its shrine and fell with a crash, he dropped the shutter, and running to the door, tugged at its heavy wooden bolt. The hut was collapsing, and he must escape into the open air.

He neither screamed nor shouted, for his terror throttled him; and after the first rushing noise the wall bowed inwards silently, with but a trickle of dry and loosened mud. His gaze, cast back across his shoulder, was on it while he tugged at the bolt. Slowly--very slowly, the roof sank, and stayed itself, held up on either hand by its two corner-props. Then, while it came to a standstill, sagging between them, the wall beneath it burst asunder, St. Joseph and St. James were flung head-over-heels after the Virgin, and through the rent poured a broad river of silver.

He faced around gradually, holding his breath. His back was to the door now, and he leaned against it with outspread palms while his eyes devoured the miracle.

Dollars! Silver dollars!