“I am sorry to see an old soldier so reduced,” said I. “What corps did you serve in?”
“H Battery, Royal Horse Artillery. Bad cess to the Service and every one in it! Here I am nigh sixty years of age, with a beggarly pension of thirty-eight pound ten—not enough to keep me in beer and baccy.”
“I should have thought thirty-eight pound ten a year would have been a nice help to you in your old age,” I remarked.
“Would you, though?” he answered with a sneer, pushing his weather-beaten face forward until it was within a foot of my own.
“How much d'ye think that slash with a tulwar is worth? And my foot with all the bones rattling about like a bagful of dice where the trail of the gun went across it. What's that worth, eh? And a liver like a sponge, and ague whenever the wind comes round to the east—what's the market value of that? Would you take the lot for a dirty forty pound a year—would you now?”
“We are poor folk in this part of the country,” I answered. “You would pass for a rich man down here.”
“They are fool folk and they have fool tastes,” said he, drawing a black pipe from his pocket and stuffing it with tobacco. “I know what good living is, and, by cripes! while I have a shilling in my pocket I like to spend it as a shilling should be spent. I've fought for my country and my country has done darned little for me. I'll go to the Rooshians, so help me! I could show them how to cross the Himalayas so that it would puzzle either Afghans or British to stop 'em. What's that secret worth in St. Petersburg, eh, mister?”
“I am ashamed to hear an old soldier speak so, even in jest,” said I sternly.
“Jest, indeed!” he cried, with a great, roaring oath. “I'd have done it years ago if the Rooshians had been game to take it up. Skobeloff was the best of the bunch, but he's been snuffed out. However, that's neither here nor there. What I want to ask you is whether you've ever heard anything in this quarter of a man called Heatherstone, the same who used to be colonel of the 41st Bengalis? They told me at Wigtown that he lived somewhere down this way.”
“He lives in that large house over yonder,” said I, pointing to Cloomber Tower. “You'll find the avenue gate a little way down the road, but the general isn't over fond of visitors.”