“Yes,” muttered General Hedley, as he looked back at his triumphant enemies exulting over his defeat, but too helpless to pursue, “make much of it; a reverse may come sooner than you expect.”
“I don’t like being beaten like this, Master Fred,” grumbled Samson, leaning over to smooth the reeking coat of the horse his young master rode; “and it’s all your fault.”
“My fault? How?”
“Holding me back as you did, and letting that brother of mine get away sneering and sniggering at me, with his nose cocked up in the air, and swelling with pride till he’s like the frog in the fable.”
“How do you know he was sneering at you?” said Fred, who felt stiff, sore, and as if he would give anything to dismount and lie down among the soft elastic heather.
“How do I know, sir? Why, because it’s his nature to. You don’t understand him as I do. I can’t see him, because I can’t look through that hill, but I know as well as can be that he’s riding on his horse close to Master Scarlett, and going off.”
“Going off?”
“Yes, sir, in little puffs of laughing. It’s his aggravating way. And he’s keeping on saying, ‘Poor old Samson!’ till it makes my blood bile.”
“What nonsense! He is more likely to be riding away jaded, and sore, and disheartened.”
“Not he, sir, because he aren’t got no heart, and never had none—leastways, not a proper sort of heart. I can feel it, and I always could. He’s a-sneering at us all, and thinking how he has beaten us, when, if you had let me have my head, I could have gone at him sword in hand—”