terest suddenly. One or two leaned
forward. "He belonged to the 4th Regiment, and was at the siege
of Badajos. During the sack of the city he broke into a house,
and--and--after that he was missing."

"Go on," said the Coroner, for the witness had paused.

"That was where he first met my mother, sir. It was her house, and she
and a priest kept him hidden till the English had left. After that he
married her. There were three children--all boys. My brothers came
first: they were twins. I was born two years later."

"All born in Badajos?"

"All in Badajos, sir. My brothers will be there still, if they're
living."

"But these delusions--"

"I'm coming to them. My father must have been hurt, somehow hurt in
his head. He would have it that my two brothers--twins, sir, if you'll
be pleased to mark it--were no sons of his, but of two friends of
his, soldiers of the 4th Regiment who had been killed, the both, that
evening by the San Vincente bastion. So you see he must have been
wrong in his head."

"And you?"

"O, there couldn't be any mistake about me. I was his very image,
and--perhaps I ought to say, sir--he hated me for it. When my mother
died--she had been a fruit-seller--he handed the business over to my
brothers, taking only enough to carry him back to England and me
with him. The day after we landed in London he apprenticed me to a
brassworker. I was just turned fifteen, and from that day until last
Wednesday three weeks we never set eyes on each other."

"Let me see," said the Coroner, turning back a page or two. "At the
last moment just before he fell, you say--and the other witnesses
confirm it--that he called out twice--uttered two names, I think."

"They were the names by which he used to call my brothers, sir--the
names of his two mates in the storming party."

THE TWO SCOUTS

_Chapters from the Memoirs of Manuel (or Manus) McNeill, an agent
in the Secret Service of Great Britain during the campaigns of the
Peninsula (1808-1813). A Spanish subject by birth, and a Spaniard in
all his upbringing, he traces in the first chapter of his Memoirs
his descent from an old Highland family through one Manus McNeill,
a Jacobite agent in the Court of Madrid at the time of the War of
Succession, who married and settled at Aranjuez. The authenticity of
these Memoirs has been doubted, and according to Napier the name of
the two scouts whom Marmont confused together (as will appear in a
subsequent chapter)