"Glad to meet you, señors," he cried. "Which is my cousin?"
"You speak English?" asked Tom, when the greetings were over.
"Not a word; but Portuguese, of course."
"Then Jack must hurry up with his lessons," grinned Tom; for his adjutant, with that perverseness common to many English lads, hated languages. Too full, perhaps, of insular pride, he imagined that his own tongue should carry him everywhere, and that foreigners should promptly contrive to add English to theirs, rather than that he should be bothered to master any language beyond his own. A perverseness, one may call it, a perverseness that gives the foreigner an enormous opportunity, and in these days of easy transit and of broadened interests, is telling against the Englishman. The polyglot Britisher of to-morrow will advance better and farther than will the man of to-day who is ignorant of all other languages than his own. However, Jack was not the one to be stupid, and, indeed, for quite a while had been struggling with French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
The four weeks which followed were busy ones for the three young fellows. First the men of the estate had to be called up, together with others living in the neighbourhood.
"We want three hundred, so as to match those in Portugal," said Tom. "It will be as well also to have a reserve, who can go on training in our absence. I shall do the same with the men we have raised in Portugal, and, as it seems that the two forces are at this moment separated by only some fifty miles, there will be no need to move nearer. But we must enlist the help of men living between us. It will not be difficult to devise signals, such as fires on the hilltops, which will warn either party or will summon one to join the other."
The end of the month found Alfonso's particular command sufficiently trained for active work. No large amount of drill was given them; but they were able to perform simple movements, and, at Jack's suggestion, worked at the call of a whistle. One long call would see their bivouacs broken, their knapsacks swung over their shoulders, and each man in his place in the ranks, his musket at his shoulder. Consisting of three hundred men, they were divided into companies a hundred strong, for each of which a reliable leader was found. Moreover, Tom had no fault to find with the formation when those companies were drawn up for inspection.
"Smartness on parade is all very well, and good for discipline," he said, whereat Jack grinned his approval, "but it won't win engagements, and the engagements we are likely to be in don't require rigid lines. Try 'em with two long whistles."
Alfonso had barely given the signals when the companies broke up as if by magic and re-formed at once into small squares, with some fifty paces between them.