The man's face, wrinkled, dark and ape-like, looked up.
"He was a good pal, pore old ——," he said. "You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody."
"If I had given him leave," Tietjens said, "he would not be dead now."
"No, surely not," One Seven Thomas answered. "But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him."
"So you knew, too, about his wife!" Tietjens said.
"We thocht it wass that," One Seven Thomas answered, "or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn."
A sudden sense of the publicity that life was came over Tietjens.
"You knew that," he said. "I wonder what the hell you fellows don't know and all!" he thought. "If anything went wrong with one it would be all over the command in two days. Thank God, Sylvia can't get here!"
The man had risen to his feet. He fetched a towel of the sergeant-major's, very white with a red border.
"We know," he said, "that your honour is a very goot cahptn. And Captain McKechnie is a fery goot cahptn. And Captain Prentiss, and Le'tennant Jonce of Merthyr . . ."