"'So we have you at last!' he said, regarding me with a jocular smile and a head cocked on one side, pretty much after the fashion of a thrush eyeing a worm. 'But, excuse me, after so much finesse it was a blunder--hein?' "Now _finesse_ is not a word which I should have claimed at any time for my methods,[A] and I cast about in my memory for the exploit to which he could be alluding. [Footnote A: NOTE BY MANUEL MCNEILL.--Here the captain, in his hurry to pay me a compliment, does himself some injustice. _Finesse_, to be sure, was not generally characteristic of his methods, but he used it at times with amazing dexterity, as, for instance, the latter part of this very adventure will prove, if I can ever prevail on him to narrate it. On the whole I should say that he disapproved of _finesse_ much as he disapproved of swearing, but had a natural aptitude for both.] "'It is the mistake of clever men,' continued General Ducrôt sagely, 'to undervalue their opponents; but surely after yesterday the commonest prudence might have warned you to put the greatest possible distance between yourself and Sabugal.' "'Sabugal?' I echoed. "'Oh, my dear sir, _we_ know. It was amusing--eh!--the barber's shop? I assure you I laughed. It was time for you to be taken; for really, you know, you could never have bettered it, and it is not for an artist to wind up by repeating inferior successes.' "For a moment I thought the man daft. What on earth (I asked myself) was this nonsense about Sabugal and a barber's shop? I had not been near Sabugal; as for the barber's shop it sounded to me like a piece out of the childish rigmarole about cutting a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie. Some fleeting suspicion I may have had that here was another affair in which you and I had again managed to get confused; but if so the suspicion occurred only to be dismissed. A fortnight before you had left me on your way south to Badajoz, and you will own that to connect you with something which apparently had happened yesterday in a barber's shop in Sabugal was to overstrain guessing. Having nothing to say, I held my tongue; and General Ducrôt put on a more magisterial air. He resented this British phlegm in a prisoner with whom he had been graciously jocose and fell back on his national belief that we islanders, though occasionally funny, are so by force of eccentricity rather than by humour. "'I do not propose to deal with you myself,' he announced. 'At one time and another, sir, you have done our cause an infinity of mischief, and I prefer that the Duke of Ragusa should decide your fate. I shall send you therefore to Sabugal to await his return.' "This gave me my first intimation that Marmont was neither in Sabugal nor with his main army. That same afternoon they marched me off to the town and set me under guard in a house next door to his headquarters.