Zanetto continued, drawing from eleven to nineteen. Brocard, still without reading them, tore them up one after another. Twenty reached, he took the slip, lifted it above his head, and sobbed, rather than spoke, in his endeavors to conceal his emotion:
"The Sergeant-Major Gambetta!"
It was the best instructed under-officer perhaps in the regiment; calm, well knowing his duties, laborious—so useful, in fact, in the humble post he held that his superiors through pure selfishness had never proposed him for promotion. He was forty years of age at least, had received the cross as far back as 1805, and with the money of his pension relieved many a little want of his comrades.
"Ah! poor Gasparini!" he cried with a sort of mournful merriment; "if today is the day of the old growlers, it is also the day of sergeants. What is the matter, mon capitaine?" said he as he passed me. "You seem to be in trouble."
He was not far wrong. I was in despair. My eyes were fixed upon the mountain as if they would pierce through it, and at every changing shadow, every breath of wind which sighed among the trees, my heart bounded painfully with the hope that the long wished for guerilla was about making his appearance on the heights.
"Adieu, Zanetto! take my cross, I have no watch. Show yourself some day worthy to wear it. May it be long ere we meet again, captain. God guard you!"
He crossed himself devoutly, and walked to the trench, his hands in his pockets, bent one knee to the earth, and gave the word "Fire!"
We heard a report; Gambetta, his head shattered by the bullets, rolled like a lump of lead into the trench.
"Will those beggarly Spaniards never appear?" said I to Brocard aside. "I have had more than enough of this."
"Hush!" replied Brocard. "You do not know them yet as well as I, who have been in the peninsula since 1807. I have just discovered the whole band in the declivity yonder before us. They are climbing along above, so as to attack us in front and on both flanks at once. I have counted three hundred muskets and carbines. We will have hot enough work in a few minutes."