Arm! arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s opening roar!”
Childe Harold.
To the buzz of voices round me I had been fully conscious for the last five minutes; but the first words I understood distinctly, was an earnest inquiry, on the part of Lieutenant Crotty, regarding the safety of what he termed “the stolen horse;” and great was his sorrow on learning that the charger was defunct.
“Blessed Bridget!” he exclaimed; “what a pity! Worth two hundred, if he was worth a taaster. * Well—it only shows that old swin’s true—What comes over the old lad’s back, whisks away under his belly. But I would like to know what the divil killed the rider? I’ve groped him all over, and sorra scratch I can find upon him but this clip upon the head, and many a worse I’ve got often at a hurling match. As he’s dead, however—”
* Anglice,—Tester, a sixpence.
“I am not dead, Peter!” I muttered.
“Then, upon my sowl I’m glad to hear it from such good authority!” returned Mr. Crotty. “Give him another taste out of the canteen! If there’s life in a man, brandy’s the thing to find it out. Here we are—safe and comfortable against every thing but shells;—I thought I heard the whiz of one of them a while ago—may the curse o’ God light upon their inventor! You must know 1 have a mortal dread of them—and I’ll tell ye why.—The day before Salamanca, when Marmont and my Lord were watching each other like two pickpockets, the column halted, to let the men cook dinner, if they had any to cook. Well—I had none,—so I set out on the ramble, to see if luck would stand my friend—and who should I find behind a big rock, and eating cold pork, but Pat Dogherty and Charley Blake, of the ould “rough and readies,”—the 13th. “Peter!” says Charley, “didye get ye’r dinner yet?” “Divil a pick!” says I; “and, what’s more, I wish somebody would tell me where it’s to come from?”
“Draw a chair,” says he, jokin’, “and take share of the pork.”
“Arrah, niver say it again,” says I, so down I pops upon the grass, and, feaks, made a beautiful dinner of it. Well—out came the canteens, in coorse; and we begins drinkin’—when bang goes two or three guns from the hill opposite us, on which the French were marchin’.
“What’s that?” says Charley. “Nothing,” says Pat Dogherty, “only that thief Marmont is bent upon some roguery; and just wants, by kickin’ up a row, to draw off the old lad’s attention—manin, ye see, Lord Wellington.”