And here his career--of fame or of shame--must have been over and done with, if he had not already won good-liking among the men of his company. For one of them with his next step ready to be planted on the young officer’s breast, caught a view of his face, by the light of a fire-ball, stopped short, and stooped over him. “Blow me!” he exclaimed, while likely to be blown into a thousand pieces; “if this bain’t the very young chap as saved me when I wur a dropping upon the road. One good turn desarves another. Here, Bob, lend a hand, my boy.” “A hand! I can’t lend thee a hinch,” cried Bob; “they be squazing me up like a squatting match.” For while all the front men were thus lying dead, the men from the rear would not stop from shoving, and bodily heaving the others before them, as buffaloes rush when they lose their wits. They thrust, every man his front man on the _chevaux de frise_, as if it were a joke, with that bitter recklessness of life and readiness to take their own turn at death which drive in one solid mass all true Britons, and their cousins across the Atlantic, whenever the strong blood is churned within them. And yet all this time they know what they are about. And so did these two soldiers now. Neither time nor room had they to lift poor Hilary out of the bed of shattered granite where he lay, with wedged spikes sticking into him. And the two men who wanted to do it were swept by the surge of living bodies upwards. But first they did this--which saved his life--they threw two muskets across him. Loaded or empty, they knew not; and of course it could not matter so long as the climbing men (clambering hard to their death) found it readier for their feet to tread on the bridge of these muskets (piered with blocks of granite) than on the ribs of poor Hilary. So the struggle went on; and there he lay, and began to peep under other people’s legs. In this rather difficult position he failed to make out anything at all to satisfy or to please him. Listeners hear little good of themselves, and lurking gazers have about the same luck. Not that Hilary was to be blamed for lying in this groove, inasmuch as he really had no chance or even time to get out of it. A great hulking Yorkshireman (as he turned out) had fallen obliquely upon Hilary’s bridge, and was difficult to push aside, and quite impossible to lift up. He groaned a good deal, but he was not dead--if he had not been a Yorkshireman the one fact might have implied the other, but Yorkshiremen do groan after death: however, he was not dead; and he keeps a mill on the Swale at this minute.