‘To know your master. Take that,’ and Jubbock aimed a tremendous blow at Herbert, which the latter promptly parried, and with a smart ‘one—two’ put the great fellow flat on his back.
There was a shout in the barrack-room as Jubbock rose furious and closed with his opponent. Then came a hubbub of voices. ‘The sergeant, the sergeant! Sergeant Pepper, the “Real Cayenne!”’ as he was commonly called when he looked like mischief.
‘What’s this? Quarrelling in the barrack-room? I’ll not have it. Drop it. Who began it? You, Larkins? Then to the guard-room you’ll go, double quick. Here, Corporal Smirke, get a file of men.’
‘But t’other chap rasperated him,’ Hanlon put in. ‘Jubbock’s more to blame than Larkins. If you shop one you must shop the other.’
‘So I will. I’ll run them both in—march them off.’
And so Herbert, with a smarting sense of injustice, found himself relegated to the guard-house, and locked up for the night.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE ORDER BOOK.
Herbert woke after a troubled night’s rest, disturbed by the occasional irruption of comrades brought in by the piquet and patrols, in various stages of intoxication, and the visits of the sergeant of the guard. The bare boards had been his bed, and he ached in every limb. It was with a sense of relief almost, although he dreaded the ordeal before him, that he washed and cleaned himself up preparatory to taking his place in the ranks with the rest of ‘the prisoners.’ With them, under escort of the guard, he was presently marched to the orderly-room, and then, after waiting half-an-hour for his turn, he was marched into the presence of his commanding officer, to answer for his alleged crime.