tence in the latest General
Order affecting my own movements, and this obliged me to make some
slight alteration in my original message. So that, what with one thing
and another, it wanted but an hour of dawn when I regained the yard of
the Posada del Rio and cautiously re-entered the little granary.

Rain had fallen during the night--two or three short but heavy
showers. Creeping on one's belly between the damp graves of a cemetery
is not the pleasantest work in the world, and I was shivering with wet
and cold and an instant want of sleep. But as I closed the door behind
me and turned to grope for the ladder to my sleeping loft, I came to
a halt, suddenly and painfully wide awake. There was someone in
the granary. In the pitch darkness my ear caught the sound of
breathing--of someone standing absolutely still and checking his
breath within a few paces of me--perhaps six, perhaps less.

I, too, stood absolutely still, and lifted my hand towards the hasp of
the door. And as I did so--in all my career I cannot recall a nastier
moment--as my hand went up, it encountered another. I felt the fingers
closing on my wrist, and wrenched loose. For a moment our two hands
wrestled confusedly; but while mine tugged at the latch the other
found the key and twisted it round with a click. (I had oiled the lock
three nights before.) With that I flung myself on him, but again my
adversary was too quick, for as I groped for his throat my chest
struck against his uplifted knee, and I dropped on the floor and
rolled there in intolerable pain.

No one spoke. As I struggled to raise myself on hands and knees, I
heard the chipping of steel on flint, and caught a glimpse of a face.
As its lips blew on the tinder this face vanished and reappeared, and
at length grew steady in the blue light of the sulphur match. It was
not the face, however, on which my eyes rested in a stupid wonder,
but the collar below it--the scarlet collar and tunic of a British
officer.

And yet the face may have had something to do with my bewilderment. I
like, at any rate, to think so; because I have been in corners quite
as awkward, yet have never known myself so pitifully demoralised. The
uniform might be that of a British officer, but the face was that of
Don Quixote de la Mancha, and shone at me in that blue light straight
out of my childhood and the story-book. High brow, high cheek-bone,
long pointed jaw, lined and patient face--I saw him as I had known him
a