Read Online Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold by Bernard Cornwell - Free Book Online Page A

frontage. “And you won’t pull your trigger until Lieutenant Vicente gives the order. You can trust him! He’s a good soldier, your Lieutenant!” Vicente blushed and perhaps made some modest changes to his interpretation, but the grins on his men’s faces suggested the lawyer had conveyed the gist of Sharpe’s words. “Make sure your muskets are loaded,” Sharpe said, “but not cocked. I don’t want the enemy knowing we’re here because some careless halfwit lets off a cocked musket. Now, enjoy killing the bastards.” He left them on that bloodthirsty note and walked back to the crest where he knelt beside Harper. “Are they doing anything?” he asked, nodding toward the dragoons.
    “Getting drunk,” Harper said. “Gave them the talk, did you?”
    “Is that what it is?”
    “Don’t get drunk, don’t thieve and fight like the devil. Mister Sharpe’s sermon.”
    Sharpe smiled, then took the telescope from the Sergeant and trained it at the village where a score of dragoons, their green coats unbuttoned,were squirting wineskins into their mouths. Others were searching the small houses. A woman with a torn black dress ran from one house, was seized by a cavalryman and dragged back indoors. “I thought the villagers were gone,” Sharpe said.
    “I’ve seen a couple of women,” Harper said, “and doubtless there are plenty more we can’t see.” He ran a huge hand over the lock of his rifle. “So what are we going to do with them?”
    “We’re going to piss up their noses,” Sharpe said, “till they decide to swat us away and then we’re going to kill them.” He collapsed the glass and told Harper exactly how he planned to defeat the dragoons.
    The vineyards gave Sharpe the opportunity. The vines grew in close thick rows that stretched from the stream on their left to some woodland off to the west, and the rows were broken only by a footpath that gave laborers access to the plants which offered dense cover for Sharpe’s men as they crawled closer to Barca d’Avintas. Two careless French sentries watched from the village’s edge, but neither saw anything threatening in the spring countryside and one of them even laid his carbine down so he could pack a small pipe with tobacco. Sharpe put Vicente’s men close to the footpath and sent his riflemen off to the west so that they were closer to the paddock in which the dragoons’ horses were picketed. Then he cocked his own rifle, lay down so that the barrel protruded between two gnarled vine roots and aimed at the nearest sentry.
    He fired, and the butt slammed back into his shoulder and the sound was still echoing from the village’s walls when his riflemen began shooting at the horses. Their first volley brought down six or seven of the beasts, wounded as many again and started a panic among the other tethered animals. Two managed to pull their picketing pins out of the turf and jumped the fence in an attempt to escape, but then circled back toward their companions just as the rifles were reloaded and fired again. More horses screamed and fell. A half-dozen of the riflemen were watching the village and began shooting at the first dragoons to run toward the paddock. Vicente’s infantry remained hidden, crouching among the vines. Sharpe saw that the sentry he had shot was crawling up the street, leavinga bloody trail, and, as the smoke from that shot faded, he fired again, this time at an officer running toward the paddock. More dragoons, fearing they were losing their precious horses, ran to unpicket the beasts and the rifle bullets began to kill men as well as horses. An injured mare whinnied pitifully and then the dragoons’ commanding officer realized he could not rescue the horses until he had driven away the men who were slaughtering them and so he shouted at his cavalrymen to advance into the vines and drive the attackers off.
    “Keep shooting the horses!” Sharpe shouted. It was not a pleasant job. The screams of the wounded beasts