“Oh! about being girlish and—and—and, well, cowardly, I suppose you mean.”
“Yes, cowardly,” I said bitterly. “I thought I should be so brave, and that when I had found where my father was I should fight and bring him away from among the savages.”
“Ah! yes,” said Jack Penny dryly, “that’s your sort! That’s like what you read in books and papers about boys of fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen. They’re wonderful chaps, who take young women in their arms and then jump on horseback with ’em and gallop off at full speed. Some of ’em have steel coats like lobsters on, and heavy helmets, and that makes it all the easier. I’ve read about some of them chaps who wielded their swords—they never swing ’em about and chop and stab with ’em, but wield ’em, and they kill three or four men every day and think nothing of it. I used to swallow all that stuff, but I’m not such a guffin now.”
There was a pause here, while Jack Penny seemed to be thinking.
“Why, some of these chaps swim across rivers with a man under their arm, and if they’re on horseback they sing out a battle-cry and charge into a whole army, and everybody’s afraid of ’em. I say, ain’t it jolly nonsense Joe Carstairs?”
“I suppose it is,” I said sadly, for I had believed in some of these heroes too.
“I don’t believe the boy ever lived who didn’t feel in an awful stew when he was in danger. Why, men do at first before they get used to it. There was a chap came to our place last year and did some shepherding for father for about six months. He’d been a soldier out in the Crimean war and got wounded twice in the arm and in the leg, big wounds too. He told me that when they got the order to advance, him and his mates, they were all of a tremble, and the officers looked as pale as could be, some of ’em; but every man tramped forward steady enough, and it wasn’t till they began to see their mates drop that the want to fight began to come. They felt savage, he says, then, and as soon as they were in the thick of it, there wasn’t a single man felt afraid.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then he went on again:
“If men feel afraid sometimes I don’t see why boys shouldn’t; and as to those chaps who go about in books killing men by the dozen, and never feeling to mind it a bit, I think it’s all gammon.”
“Hist! Jack Penny, what’s that?” I whispered.