I found that he had been shot in the head, the ball having entered at one eye, and seemingly passed out at the other. His face was suffused with gore, but he was not dead.

I was about to finish his short career with a thrust of my lance, when it struck me it would be less merciful to allow the blind wretch to eke out his miserable existence. Stripping him, therefore, of his epaulettes, “You may live, young hidalgo,” said I, “unless you are lucky enough to find some Frenchman more charitably disposed towards you than myself. You will yet serve for an espantajo!”[182]

“What!” exclaimed the youth, “is it a Spaniard who pillages a dying countryman? Is it a vile renegade that taunts me with the disfigurement of an honourable wound? Then may my dying curse be upon him; may it ring perpetually in his ears, as a foretaste of torments to be endured, should my arm fail in sending him at once to eternal punishment!”

So saying, he snatched a pistol from his breast, and, ere I could arrest his hand, fired in the direction he judged me to be. The ball—would it had been more surely aimed!—merely grazed my left cheek, leaving the mark you may see through my bushy whisker.

Provoked beyond endurance by this act, I seized my adversary by the throat, and, forcing my knife into his mouth, cut out the tongue that had so lately cursed me; and then, after watching some moments the wreathings of my tortured victim, sheathed it in his breast.

I felt in so doing that it had struck against something hard—I thought, perhaps, a watch; and, tearing open his jacket, discovered, oh God!—that I was the murderer of my son!

CHAPTER XIV.
BLAS EL GUERRILLERO—continued.

The worthy Señor Blas having quaffed a bumper of Xeres seco, by way of drowning his sorrow, thus continued his story:—

I fell senseless on the mangled corpse of my beloved Fernando. How long I remained in this state I know not, but I was aroused by the jeers of some French soldiers, who, tearing me rudely from the now cold body of my son, asked if I had fairly earned my compatriot’s epaulettes; at the same time very unceremoniously transferring them from my sash, into which I had hastily thrust them, to their own havre-sacks.

I offered no resistance; but, when they were about to rob me as unceremoniously of the chain and locket, proofs of my son’s identity, which my damp and blood-stained hand yet held in its convulsive grasp, I checked their insolence by a look at my gory knife, taking at the same time from my breast, and throwing towards them, the carte de protection of their general. They passed on, carrying off the epaulettes, and laughing at and mimicking the grief and anger depicted in my countenance.