"And what do you require of me?" said the gipsy, with a quick eagerness
that contrasted strongly with his previous apathetic indifference.

"I will tell you," said Paco, "but in some more private place than
this."

"Let us be gone," said the gipsy.

And as the first of the soldiers re-entered the field, the two men
passed through a gap in the hedge that bounded it, and were lost to view
in the adjacent thicket.

It was about an hour after sunset, and contrary to what is usual at that
season and in that country, the night was dark and cloudy. A slight mist
rose from the fields surrounding the village, and a fine rain began to
fall. In the guard-room adjoining the house in which Luis Herrera was
prisoner, the soldiers on duty were assembled round a rickety table, on
which a large coarse tallow candle, stuck in a bottle, flared and
guttered, and emitted an odour even more powerful than that of the
tobacco smoke with which the room was filled. The air was heavy, the
heat oppressive, and both the house-door and that of the guard-room,
which was at right angles to it, just within the passage, were left
open. Whilst some few of the men, their arms crossed upon the table, and
their heads laid upon them, dozed away the time till their turn for
going on sentry should arrive, the sergeant and the remainder of the
guard, including a young recruit who had only two days before deserted
from the Christinos and been incorporated in a Carlist battalion,
consumed successive measures of wine, to be paid for by those who were
least successful in a trial of skill that was going on amongst them.
This consisted in drinking _de alto_, as it is called--literally, from a
height, and was accomplished by holding a small narrow-necked bottle at
arm's length above the head, and allowing the wine to flow in a thin
stream into the mouth. In this feat of address the new recruit, whose
name was Perrico, was so successful as to excite the envy of his less
dexterous rivals.

"Pshaw!" said the sergeant, who, in a clumsily executed attempt, had
inundated his chin and mustache with the purple liquid--"Pshaw!" said
he, on seeing the deserter raise his bottle in the air and allow its
contents to trickle steadily and noiselessly down his expanded gullet;
"Perrico beats us all."

"No wonder," said a soldier, "he is from the country where Grenache and
Tinto are more plentiful than water, and where nobody drinks in any
other way, or ever puts a glass to h