Sword in hand, Major Cox entered the gorge; Major (afterwards General Sir Robert) Dick led the regiment on _en masse_, and the hornwork was immediately captured; but two lieutenants and thirty-two rank and file were killed; four officers, one volunteer, and one hundred and sixty-four Highlanders were wounded. Captain Donald Williamson expired that night of his wounds. Lane, the poor gentleman volunteer, was severely wounded and became senseless; but revived, on finding two of the Cameron Highlanders gently abstracting a gold watch worth fifty guineas from his pocket. "I beg your pardon, my lads," said he; "but I am not quite done with this.' "We beg yours, sir," answered they; "but we thought you dead, and supposed we might take it, as well as others." They carried him carefully to the rear; and as they were returning, two stray shots killed them both. Lieutenant Gregorson was killed, and found stripped naked, by Lieutenant Orr, who buried him in a trench. In the gorge of this hornwork, so fatal to the Black Watch, their old Quartermaster Blanket, had both his legs carried away; so he might fairly have sung, "O now let others shoot, For here I leave my _second legs_, And the _Forty-second Foot_." He lived long a prisoner at Bitche and Verdun, and by his fiery temper and wooden pins was named by the French _le Diable Boiteux_. In this siege the regiment had other losses; but the concentration of the enemy's forces, and the advance of superior numbers, obliged the Duke of Wellington to retire into winter quarters on the frontiers of Portugal; and the fatigues and privations incident to this retrograde movement, fell on no regiment more heavily than on our friends of the Black Watch. On a gloomy afternoon in the month of November, pressed by the enemy's cavalry, who were vastly superior to the British, the brigade of which the 42nd formed a part, entered the ancient and pleasant city of Valladolid, all drenched and bedraggled by fording the swift Pisuerga; for the French, to impede our previous advance, had blown up the principal arch of the bridge. Dick Duff was taken prisoner by the French hussars in a taberna, at Villanoz, by the treachery of the keeper, a well-known Spanish rogue, named Antonio Morello. By his captors and the hostalero he had been stripped nude, but made his escape and rejoined the regiment (just as it was entering Valloria) clad only in a pair of short scarlet pantaloons, which he had taken from a dead Frenchman of the line, and his aspect created no small surprise in the ranks--but I cannot add merriment, for our soldiers were then at the lowest ebb of misery and desperation. During this terrible retreat the rain had been incessant, and poured pitilessly down on the wet, dripping sierras and rough muddy mule roads traversed by our troops, whose sufferings and privations were indescribable.