beside you: and when things grow hot, and your lilywhite soul begins
to shiver, I'll be close to you still--but _behind_ you, my daisy!'
So I promised him, and, being a coward, he chose it. I tell you I
kept my word too: it's lucky for you, boy, that I'm a connoisseur in
my grudges. But Whitmore--he'd betrayed me, you see. Often and
often I had him alone and crying! and I promised myself to be behind
him on just such a job as we're in for--a night assault: oh, he'd
have enjoyed that! But he couldn't stand it. At Celorico he gave me
the slip and deserted: and now he's in Ciudad Rodrigo, yonder, and
the trap's closing, and--what's he feeling like, think you? Eh?
I know him: it'll get worse and worse for him till the end, and--it's
a bad death for deserters."

He paused, panting with hate and coughing the fog out of his lungs.
I shrank away against the wall of the trench.

"When he's done with, I won't say but what I'll turn my attention to
you--or to Plinlimmon. You know what Plinlimmon was after--that
morning--on the roof? He was there to steal."

He eyed me.

"Yes," said I with sudden courage, "he was there to steal. And you
were waiting below, to share profits."

He fell back a pace, still eyeing me.

"I'll have to find another way with you than with Whitmore--that's
evident," he said with a short laugh, and was gone.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN CIUDAD RODRIGO.

Two days later our breaching batteries opened on the town.

It is not for me to describe this wonderful siege, the operations of
which, though witnessing them in part, I did not understand in the
least. I have read more than one book about it since, and could draw
you a map blindfold and tell you where the counter-batteries stood,
and where the lunette which Colborne carried, and how far behind it
lay the Convent of San Francisco; where the parallels ran, where the
French brought down a howitzer, and where by a sortie they came near
to cutting up a division. I could trace you the _fausse braye_ and
the main walls, and put my finger on the angle where our guns pierced
the greater breach, and carry it across to the tower where, by the
lesser breach, our own storming-party of the Light Division climbed
into the town. During the next five days I saw a many things
shattered to lay the foundations of a fame which still is proved the
sounder the closer men examine it--I mean Lord Wellington's: and in
the end I, Harry Revel, contributed my mit