They were received with the heartiest welcome by the colonel and officers; in whose ranks, however, there were several gaps, for the regiment had suffered heavily at Fuentes d'Onoro.
"So you have been taken prisoner again, Terence!" Captain O'Grady exclaimed; "sure, it must be on purpose you did it. Anyone may get taken prisoner once; but when it happens twice, it begins to look as if he was fonder of French rations than of French guns."
"I didn't think of it in that light, O'Grady; but now you put it so, I will try and not get caught for the third time."
"We heard of your return, of course, and that you had gone straight with your regiment to Miranda. We had a line from Dicky, the day before he started; and mighty unkind we have thought it that neither of you have sent us a word since then, and you with nothing to do at all, at all; while we have been marching and countermarching, now here and now there, now backwards and now forwards, ever since Fuentes d'Onoro, till one's legs were ready to drop off one."
"Give someone else a chance to put in a word, O'Grady," the colonel said. "Here we are, all dying to know how O'Connor slipped through the hands of the French again; and sorra a word can anyone get in, when your tongue is once loosened. If you are not quiet, I will take him away with me to my own quarters; and just ask two or three men, who know how to hold their tongue, to come up and listen to his story."
"I will be as silent as a mouse, colonel dear," O'Grady said, humbly; "though I would point out that O'Connor, being a colonel like yourself, and in no way under your orders, might take it into his head to prefer to stop with us here, instead of going with you.
"Now, Terence, we are all waiting for your story. Why don't you go on?"
"Because, as you see, I am hard at work eating, just at present. We have marched twenty miles this morning, with nothing but a crust of bread at starting; and the story will keep much better than luncheon."
Terence did not hurry himself over his meal but, when he had finished, he gave them particulars of his escape from Salamanca, his journey down to Cadiz, and then round by Lisbon.
"I thought there would be a woman in it, Terence," O'Grady exclaimed. "With a soft tongue, and a presentable sort of face, and impudence enough for a whole regiment, it was aisy for you to put the comhether on a poor Spanish girl, who had never had the good luck to meet an officer of the Mayo Fusiliers before. Sure, I have always said to meself that, if I was ever taken prisoner, it would not be long before some good-looking girl would take a fancy to me, and get me out of the French clutches. Sure, if a young fellow like yourself, without any special recommendations except a bigger share of impudence than usual, could manage it; it would be aisy, indeed, for a man like meself, with all the advantages of having lost an arm in battle, to get round them."
There was a shout of laughter round the table, for O'Grady had, as usual, spoken with an air of earnest simplicity, as if the propositions he was laying down were beyond question.
"You must have had a weary time at Miranda, since you came back, O'Connor," the colonel said, "with no one there but a wing of the 65th."
"I don't suppose they were to be pitied, colonel," Doctor O'Flaherty laughed. "You may be sure that they kept Miranda lively, in some way or other. Trust them for getting into mischief of some sort."
"There is no saying what we might have done if we had, as you suppose, been staying for the last two months at Miranda; but in point of fact that has not been the case. We have been across the frontier, and have been having a pretty lively time of itat least I have, for Dick has spent a month of it inside a French prison."
"What!" the major exclaimed, "were you with that force that has been puzzling us all, and has been keeping the French in such hot water that, as we hear, Marmont was obliged to give up his idea of invading Portugal, and had to hurry off twenty thousand men, to save Salamanca and Valladolid from being captured? Nobody has been able to understand where the army sprung from, or how it was composed. The general idea was that a division from England must have landed, at either Oporto or Vigo, or that it must have been brought round from Sicily; for none of our letters
or papers said a word about any large force having sailed from England. Not a soul seemed to know anything about it. I know a man on Crawford's staff, and he assured me that none of them were in the secret.
"A French officer, who was brought in a prisoner a few days since, put their numbers down at twenty-five thousand, at least; including, he said, a large guerilla force. He said that Zamora had been cut off for a long time, that the country had been ravaged, and posts captured almost at the gates of Salamanca; and that communications had been interrupted, and large convoys captured between Burgos and Valladolid; and that one column, five thousand strong, had been very severely mauled, and forced to fall back. This confirmed the statements that we had before heard, from the peasantry and the French deserters. Now there is a chance of penetrating the mystery, which has been a profound puzzle to us here, and indeed to the whole army.