Corporal Sam Vicary, coming up to the edge of the camp-fire's light,
stood there for a moment with a white face. The cause of it--though
it would have been a sufficient one--was not the story to which the
men around the fire had been listening; for the teller, at sight of
the corporal, had broken off abruptly, knowing him to be a religious
fellow after a fashion, with a capacity for disapproval and a pair of
fists to back it up. So, while his comrades guffawed, he rather
cleverly changed the subject.

'Oh, and by the way, talkin' of the convent'--he meant the Convent of
Santa Teresa, a high building under the very slope of the citadel,
protected by its guns and still held by the enemy, after three days'
fighting--'do any of you know a small house to the left of it, with
only a strip of garden between? Sort of a mud-nest it is, like a
swallow's, stuck under overhang o' the cliff. No? Well, that's a
pity, for I hear tell the general has promised five pounds to the
first man who breaks into that house.'

'But why, at all?' inquired a man close on his right.

'I know the place,' put in another; 'a mean kind of building, with
one window lookin' down the street, and that on the second floor, as
you might say. It don't look to me the sort of house to hold five
pounds' worth, all told--let be that, to force it, a man must cross
half the fire from the convent, and in full view. Five pounds be
_damned!_ Five pounds isn't so scarce in these times that a man need
go there to fetch it for his widow.'