By the look of me, he could tell I was on the other side; but this did not appear to concern him.
“How has it gone?” asked I. “Well,” says he, with his nose in the boot; “we had a pretty rising ground, and the Cornishmen march’d up and whipp’d us out—that’s all—and took a mort o’ prisoners.” He found the prickle, drew on his boot again, and asked—
“T’other side?”
I nodded.
“That’s the laughing side, this day. Good evening.”
And with that he went off as fast as he came.
’Twas, may be, an hour after, that another came in through the same gap: this time a lean, hawk-eyed man, with a pinch’d face and two ugly gashes—one across the brow from left eye to the roots of his hair, the other in his leg below the knee, that had sliced through boot and flesh like a scythe-cut. His face was smear’d with blood, and he carried a musket.
“Water!” he bark’d out as he came trailing into the yard. “Give me water—I’m a dead man!”
He was stepping over me to enter the kitchen, when he halted and said—
“Art a malignant, for certain!”