"W-wonder no more!" bade Crashaw. "To be sure, thou art an officer—the youngest one at M-Monksfield, and b-brave as the best, eh, Tibbott?"
"I'll try, sir!" Merrylips answered, and saluted him, just as Rupert had saluted Captain Brooke.
And she did not see why those new brother officers of hers should have laughed aloud!
CHAPTER XVII
"WHO CAN SING AND WON'T SING—"
As soon as Merrylips found that her secret was safe and that she seemed to every one a little boy, she enjoyed her days at Monksfield very much. Indeed, she would have been more than human, if she had not been pleased with all the notice that she won. She was the only child in a garrison of men, and from the horseboys in the stables to the officers in the mess-room, she was petted by all.
The saddlers made her more leathern hand-balls than she could ever use. The smiths let her tug at the wheezy bellows in their sooty forge. The horseboys set her on the bare-backed horses when they led them to water. Even the cross men-cooks in the fiery kitchen made her sometimes little pasties for herself alone.
As for the troopers, they were all her friends. They let her help them, when they cleaned their bright swords or scoured their carabines. They told her endless stories of battles and sieges and of wicked Roundheads that dined on little babies. So terrible were these stories that Merrylips quite shook in her shoes to hear them, yet she could not help asking for more.
Best of all, the officers, whom she had so feared, were almost as kind as if they had been her own big brothers. They laughed at her and chaffed her, to be sure, as a little boy who had been reared too long among women, but on the whole, they all, even rough Miles Digby, were very gentle with her.
Sometimes Merrylips wondered why they were so kind. But it was not until she was much older that she realized that she owed some thanks to Captain Tibbott Norris. By some strange impulse that big, harsh man was moved toward the bit of a lad that bore his own name of Tibbott, and silently he stood his friend.