suggested no casual piece of scouting, but a deliberate
plan to entrap somebody of whose neighbourhood they were aware.

"Nor was this perplexity at all unravelled by the general officer to
whose tent they at once conveyed me--a little round white-headed man,
Ducrot by name. He addressed me at once as Captain McNeill, and seemed
vastly elated at my capture.

"'So we have you at last!' he said, regarding me with a jocular smile
and a head cocked on one side, pretty much after the fashion of a
thrush eyeing a worm. 'But, excuse me, after so much finesse it was a
blunder--hein?'

"Now _finesse_ is not a word which I should have claimed at any time
for my methods,[A] and I cast about in my memory for the exploit to
which he could be alluding.

[Footnote A: NOTE BY MANUEL MCNEILL.--Here the captain, in his hurry
to pay me a compliment, does himself some injustice. _Finesse_, to be
sure, was not generally characteristic of his methods, but he used it
at times with amazing dexterity, as, for instance, the latter part
of this very adventure will prove, if I can ever prevail on him to
narrate it. On the whole I should say that he disapproved of _finesse_
much as he disapproved of swearing, but had a natural aptitude for
both.]

"'It is the mistake of clever men,' continued General Ducrot sagely,
'to undervalue their opponents; but surely after yesterday the
commonest prudence might have warned you to put the greatest possible
distance between yourself and Sabugal.'

"'Sabugal?' I echoed.

"'Oh, my dear sir, _we_ know. It was amusing--eh!--the barber's shop?
I assure you I laughed. It was time for you to be taken; for really,
you know, you could never have bettered it, and it is not for an
artist to wind up by repeating inferior successes.'

"For a moment I thought the man daft. What on earth (I asked myself)
was this nonsense about Sabugal and a barber's shop? I had not been
near Sabugal; as for the barber's shop it sounded to me like a piece
out of the childish rigmarole about cutting a cabbage leaf to make
an apple pie. Some fleeting suspicion I may have had that here was
another affair in which you and I had again managed to get confused;
but if so the suspicion occurred only to be dismissed. A fortnight
before you had left me on your way south to Badajoz, and you will
own that to connect you with something which apparently had happened
yesterday in a barber's shop in Sabugal was to overstrain guessing.
Having noth