"What corps?" asked Wellington, though he needed no information.
"Lieutenant Clifford's, sir. Composite corps; half-Portuguese and half-Spanish."
Tom's heart thudded as the general set his horse three paces forward.
"Ah," he heard him say, "I felt sure it was they! Mr. Clifford."
"Sir," answered Tom, lowering the hilt of his broken sword.
"Mr. Barwood and the other officers, commissioned and non-commissioned," cried the general softly, causing all those individuals to come to the front.
"Gentlemen," said Wellington, his tones not raised in the slightest, as if he were discussing a matter of little interest, and yet conveying by a subtle inflection of his voice that it was no ordinary matter, "from the plain below we saw Pack's Portuguese turn tail and bolt. We saw the 4th Division heavily assailed. And then this corps was thrust into the gap. It was a brilliantly-conceived movement, and it helped to save a situation which was critical. The forming of the corps into squares was beyond all criticism. Mr. Clifford, you will be good enough to give my personal commendations to your men, whose bravery is a pattern for all their fellows. Inform them that I hold them in great respect, and that since the respect of a commander is shown through his officers, who have done so well again, those officers' names will be sent to England in my dispatches. March your men back to their camp, please."
Did the men of Tom's corps cheer? They shouted themselves hoarse after our hero had spoken to them. They trudged across the field strewn with killed and wounded with merry songs, and turned into their blankets when all was over as proud as any in Spain or Portugal.
As for Tom, he was too fatigued to even think. Once his wounded were collected and his dead buried, a gruesome job for any commander, he dropped dead asleep in his blanket. He recked not of the work before him. His slumbering mind cared not a jot for the dangers of the task which his commander had given him. If there had been fifty spies to capture, if there had been fifty mysteries hanging about the persons of the rascal José and Tom's two relatives abducted from Oporto, that young fellow would still have slept. For he had fought his first big engagement. He had done strenuous work, and nature called aloud for repose for both body and brain before he took up other responsibilities. Till the morrow, then, we leave him till the rising sun awaked in his thoughts the memory of those urgent orders.