"Pray take your seats, gentlemen. You take this chair by me,
O'Connor; and now, while you are waiting for your plate, tell us in a few
words how you escaped. Everyone made sure that you were killed. We heard
that Fane had sent you to carry an order, that you had delivered it, and
then started to rejoin him; from that time nobody saw you alive or dead."
"The matter was very simple, Colonel. My horse was hit in the head with a
round shot. I went a frightful cropper on some stones in the middle of a
clump of bushes. I lay there insensible all night, and coming-to in the
morning, saw that the French had advanced, and the firing on the hill over
the town told me that the troops had got safely on board ship. I lay quiet
all day, and at night made off, sheltered for a couple of days with some
peasants on the other side of the hill, joined Romana, went to the
Portuguese frontier with him, and then rode to Lisbon, where Sir John
Cradock was good enough to put me on his staff."
"We heard you had turned up safely at Lisbon, and glad we were, as you may
be sure, and a good jollification we had over it. As for O'Grady, it has
served as an excuse for an extra tumbler ever since."
"Bad excuses are better than none," Terence laughed, "and if it hadn't
been that, it would have been something else."
"Shut up, you young scamp," O'Grady said.
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