"Yes," said I with sudden courage, "he was there to steal. And you were waiting below, to share profits."
He fell back a pace, still eyeing me.
"I'll have to find another way with you than with Whitmore—that's evident," he said with a short laugh, and was gone.
CHAPTER XXIII.
IN CIUDAD RODRIGO.
Two days later our breaching batteries opened on the town.
It is not for me to describe this wonderful siege, the operations of which, though witnessing them in part, I did not understand in the least. I have read more than one book about it since, and could draw you a map blindfold and tell you where the counter-batteries stood, and where the lunette which Colborne carried, and how far behind it lay the Convent of San Francisco; where the parallels ran, where the French brought down a howitzer, and where by a sortie they came near to cutting up a division. I could trace you the fausse braye and the main walls, and put my finger on the angle where our guns pierced the greater breach, and carry it across to the tower where, by the lesser breach, our own storming-party of the Light Division climbed into the town. During the next five days I saw a many things shattered to lay the foundations of a fame which still is proved the sounder the closer men examine it—I mean Lord Wellington's: and in the end I, Harry Revel, contributed my mite to it in a splintered ankle. I understand now many things which were then a mere confused hurly-burly: and even now—having arrived at an age when men take stock of themselves and, casting up their accounts with life, cross out their vanities—I am proud to remember that along with the great Craufurd, Mackinnon, Vandeleur, Colborne our Colonel, and Napier, I took my unconsidered hurt. To this day you cannot speak the name of Ciudad Rodrigo to me but I hear my own bugle chiming with the rest below the breaches and swelling the notes of the advance, and my heart swells with it. But I tell you strictly what I saw, and I tell it for this reason only—that the story to which you have been listening points through those breaches, and within them has its end.
To me, watching them day by day from the hillside, they appeared but trifling gaps in the fortifications. On the 19th I never dreamed that they were capable of assault; indeed, in the lesser breach to the left my inexpert eyes could detect no gap at all. What chiefly impressed me at this time was our enemy's superiority in ammunition. Their guns fired at least thrice to our once.
Still holding myself strictly to what I saw, I can tell you even less of the assault itself. I can tell, indeed, how, on the evening of the 19th, when we were looking forward to another turn at the trenches with the Third Division, General Craufurd unexpectedly paraded us; and how, at a nod from him, Major Napier addressed us. "Men of the Light Division," he said, "we assault to-night. I have the honour to lead the storming party, and I want a hundred volunteers from each regiment. Those who will go with me, step forward."