The day passed chiefly in sitting on the leads talking. Dick's eyes scarcely left the spread-out wonder of the little cavalry camp below. Questions simply flowed from his lips, to every one of which Giles seemed to know the answer. He knew what everything meant--bugle-calls, horse-exercising, the mysteries of drill, the saddling-up, the watering, and the thousand-and-one orderly, fascinating, jingling details of a soldier's day in camp. He told, too, stories of other camps that he had seen, of brilliant leaders, like Prince Rupert, who "never comes but to conquer or to fall". He led the boy through the mazes of engagements by day and by night. He made him enjoy sieges, both inside the walls and out. He told him of deeds of valour that set his blood dancing, and deeds of shame that made him pause and think. In moonlight escapes and midnight massacres, in the silence of prisons and the noises of battlefields, in perils by land and perils by water Giles the stable-helper had had his part under the masters he had served. Dick listened to tales of strange lands and distant cities, of foreign ways and clothes and customs. Giles was indeed a perfect storehouse of romance and adventure. And his heroes were all brave and gallant, modest and of a becoming reverence. He had no condemnation deep enough for the man who was false to his God, his King, or his friends. Dick was enthralled, enraptured. To be like these men whom Giles had served and known, to think such thoughts as theirs, to say such words as theirs, to live such a life as theirs, and die such a death--this idea filled his soul. "Giles," he said, "I will be a hero, the friend of kings, faithful to death." "God knows," said Giles; "we are in His hand. To-morrow a bullet may kill you, covered with glory; or a week hence you may die in a ditch, out of sight, never missed. You may be called to rot all your years in a dungeon, or die disgraced on a gallows, for that. You cannot tell." "Why, then," said little Dick, "what is the value of striving and trying?" "Because," said Giles, "that is what we were born for." "But these masters you served?" Dick cried. "Their duty led them to glory," said Giles. "Had it led to shame, they'd have followed. My dear fellow, it's the duty that counts." CHAPTER IV THE FLAG GOES DOWN--AND UP On the sixth day of the siege Dick noticed that his lieutenant looked unwontedly serious. "What is it, Giles?" he asked. "Anything wrong?" Giles shrugged his shoulders. "Little Captain," he said, "why don't our friends, the enemy, go away or attack us?" "Go away?" Dick asked, for it had not struck him that cavalry might be better employed than in camping before a castle into which they could not seemingly get.