„We can go,” Sharpe said, and he marveled that the enemy had been so slow, thus giving him time to extricate his force. He sent Harper with most of the greenjackets to join Vicente and they took a dozen French horses with them, each horse worth a small fortune in prize money if they could ever rejoin the army. Sharpe kept Hagman and six other men and they spread along the wall and fired as fast as their rifles would load, which meant they did not wrap the bullets in leather patches which gripped the rifling, but just tapped the balls down the barrels because Sharpe did not care about accuracy, he just wanted the French to see a thick rill of smoke and hear the shots and thus not know that their enemy was withdrawing.
He pulled the trigger and the flint broke into useless scraps so he slung the rifle and backed out of the smoke to see that Vicente and Harper were both well into the vineyard and so he shouted at his remaining men to hurry back across the paddock. Hagman paused to fire a last bullet, then he ran and Sharpe went with him, the last man to leave, and he could not believe it had been that easy to disengage, that the French had been so supine, and just then Hagman went down.
At first Sharpe thought Hagman had tripped on one of the metal pegs with which the dragoons had picketed their horses, then he saw blood on the grass and saw Hagman let go of his rifle and his right hand slowly clench and unclench. „Dan!” Sharpe knelt and saw a tiny wound high up beside Hagman’s left shoulder blade, just an unlucky carbine bullet that had flicked through the smoke and found its target.
„Go on, sir.” Hagman’s voice was hoarse. „I’m done for.”
„You’re bloody not,” Sharpe snarled and he turned Hagman over onto his back and saw no wound in front, which meant the carbine ball was somewhere inside, then Hagman choked and spat up frothy blood and Sharpe heard Harper yelling at him.
„The bastards are coming, sir!”
Just one minute before, Sharpe thought, he had been congratulating himself on how easy it had been, and now it was all collapsing. He pulled Hagman’s rifle to him, slung it beside his own and picked up the old poacher who gave a gasp and a whimper and shook his head. „Leave me, sir.”
„I’m not leaving you, Dan.”
„Hurts, sir, it hurts,” Hagman whimpered again. His face was deathly pale and there was a trickle of blood spilling from his mouth, and then Harper was at Sharpe’s side and took Hagman out of his arms. „Leave me here,” Hagman said softly.
„Take him, Pat!” Sharpe said, and then some rifles fired from the vineyard and muskets banged behind him and the air was whistling with balls as Sharpe pushed Harper on. He followed, walking backward, watching the blue French uniforms appear in the mist of smoke left by their own ragged volley.
„Come on, sir!” Harper shouted, letting Sharpe know he had Hagman in the scanty shelter of the vines.
„Carry him north,” Sharpe said when he reached the vineyard.
„He’s hurting bad, sir.”
„Carry him! Get him out of here.”
Sharpe watched the French. Three companies of infantry had attacked the pasture, but they made no effort to follow Sharpe north. They must have seen the column of Portuguese and British troops winding through the vineyards accompanied by the dozen captured horses and a crowd of frightened villagers, but they did not follow. It seemed they wanted Barca d’Avintas more than they wanted Sharpe’s men dead. Even when Sharpe established himself on a knoll a half-mile north of the village and stared at the French through his telescope, they did not come near to threaten him. They could easily have chased him away with dragoons, but instead they chopped up the skiff that Sharpe had rescued and then set the fragments alight. „They’re closing off the river,” Sharpe said to Vicente.
„Closing the river?” Vicente did not understand.
„Making sure they’ve got the only boats. They don’t want British or Portuguese troops crossing the river, attacking them in the rear. Which means it’s going to be bloody hard for us to go the other way.” Sharpe turned as Harper came near, and saw that the big Irish Sergeant’s hands were bloody. „How is he?”