“I should think so,” answered Ancram, again wondering at the rudeness of the pointed interruption. “But isn’t it the deuce on the nerves? Keeps you awake, and all that.”
“In civilisation it would. Not up here. I’ve often, while lying out in camp, polished off three big beakers of it—black as ink, mind—and dropped off fast asleep when only half through my first pipe.”
“By Jove! that knocks a good old superstition endways, anyway.”
“Good job if they were all knocked endways. Now here’s another—” And then Lamont, fastening on to another topic proceeded to thresh it out, and, in fact, for him, became quite voluble, so much so that Peters could not have got a word in edgeways even if he had wanted to, which he did not. At him Ancram stole more than one glance, expecting to descry an offended look. But he descried nothing of the sort. Peters went on placidly with his supper, nodding occasional assent to the other’s remarks. But Lamont had got what he wanted; he had got clean away from the retreat from the Shangani. There was no possibility of reopening that subject, short of dragging it in by the tail. All of which set the new arrival wondering still more.
“Then if these Matabele chaps were to rise,” went on Ancram, “you—we—should all get our throats cut?”
“From ear to ear,” supplied Lamont, with grim uncompromising crispness.
“Oh, come. I say, Lamont, you’re getting at a fellow, don’t you know.”
“No, I don’t. But if you don’t believe me ask Peters.”
“The Captain’s—er—oh!—ah!—I mean Lamont’s right,” declared Peters, half briskly, half deprecatorily, as he noted the positive scowl which wrinkled his friend’s dark brows. The reason wherefor was that the latter, having held a subordinate command during the war of occupation, had experienced much trouble in convincing Peters and others that they were not to call him ‘Captain’ ever after. That sort of tin-pot aping of military rank was bad enough while they were on active service, he declared—afterwards it was simply poisonous, and there were enough ‘captains’ and ‘majors’ and ‘colonels’ knocking about Matabeleland to stock a whole Army Corps with, if they had been genuine.
Again Ancram wondered. What the deuce did it all mean, he tried to unravel, that a tough, hard-bitten frontiersman, such as he had already estimated Peters to be, should care twopence for the frown or smile of a fellow like Lamont, whom he himself had seen show the white feather on an occasion when there was the least possible excuse of all for it—indeed, he wished he himself had been at hand at the time, instead of arriving on the scene just after the rescue had been effected? Yet, somehow, there was something very solid, very square, about this, as even he realised, involuntary host of his, sitting there the very embodiment of self-possession, devil-may-care-ishness, even masterful dominance. It did not fit in, somehow, with that scene in the falling dusk, by the frozen mere at Courtland, on Christmas Eve.