“Yonder go a brave enemy!” cried Padilh, with a laugh, to his colleague in the next barge, the two maîtres-de-camp heading the flotilla with the landing party. “If any fall in your way hereafter, don’t forget they’re women; spare their lives, as you wear spurs, señor mine.”
To this Inique answered, standing erect in the stern and shading his eyes with his palm, quite another personage in voice and carriage from the penitent of two days back:
“But the line of the French has not a gap in it—yes, one, which they have just filled with a fresh man. There’ll be sharp work there, Padilh, although we are strong enough to surround and capture the whole detachment. Lay to your oars, men! Make prisoners of as many of the gallant fellows as you can.”
“What’s come over the master?” grumbled a sergeant to a crony. “Last time he marched against the French it was nothing but ‘keep your pikes level, my lads; the man that fails to spit his man, deserves to be cut over the head in return.’ And now it’s, ‘don’t hurt them, these fine fellows.’ You see, I like a man to be one thing.”
“Why, they say Señor Inique has a cousin, or a son-in-law, or something of the sort, who is no better than he should be, and at this moment in the French camp. Who knows if the señor hasn’t an idea of turning coat some day himself? It looks like it, don’t it, sergeant?”
“No; hang it, man, he wouldn’t do such a dirty thing. Why, don’t you know, you unbelieving Thomas, there ain’t a gentleman in all Spain with such a name for honor!”
“Well, may be; but I like to be sure of a thing of the sort. Honesty and uprightness is my motto.”
“Hey! what’s that Mig’s saying?” said a sailor who pulled the bow oar, with a grin, to his neighbor. “I lived near La Mécha myself, egad! and I know there wa’n’t a lamb sure of being raised so long as _he_ was about. May be he’s forgot my phiz, with the tip of my nose sliced off by that turbaned chap’s cim’tar.”
So the gossip was kept up until a volley of twenty or so arquebuses, as the fleet grounded in tolerable line, turned their thoughts too busily in another channel to leave time for such tattling; and the old campaigners of the later Moorish wars were out and formed in “battle” before Capt. Bourgignon poured in his reserve fire, and fell upon the invaders with the audacity of a hawk half as large as your hand pouncing upon a turkey a fourth as big as your body; only that the enemy was not in any respect like a turkey—more like a condor, I should say, in point of ferocity and collected action. He marched up from the submerged beach to the sands above high-water, with no more concern for the struggling handful in front than you or I would for the whiff of sleet blown in our faces on a windy day in the streets. To be sure, the smooth tablet left by the last tide, was written over with a heavy stylus, and dabbled with such ink as conquerors and others who leave their mark on the times in which they lived, employ; moreover, there were numerous unsightly blotches dropped about, which retained enough vitality sometimes to scream in a manner calculated to shock our fire-eating civilians into a wholesome distaste to civil collision and slaying. Of course, such things are necessities, like lightning and volcanic eruptions, despite the efforts of Mr. Burritt to show the contrary. The exception appears strongest when one of us loses a brother or a husband, with a bullet in the heart or head, as Amelia did George at Brussels, or more than one acquaintance of mine, now wearing premature widow’s-weeds, in the late Mexican war.