“Should you like to be in it if there was?” I said in a curious doubting manner.
Bigley rubbed one ear, and picked up a sword.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think I should; but sometimes I feel as if it would be very horrid to give a fellow a chop with a thing like this, just as if he was so much meat. I would, though, if he was going to hurt my father,” he cried with his eyes flashing. “I’d cut his arm right off. Wouldn’t you?”
“Dunno,” I said, and I began wondering whether there would ever be any occasion to use these weapons, and I could not help a shrinking sensation of dread coming over me, for I seemed to see the horror as well as the glory of shooting down human beings, and more than ever it occurred to me that if trouble did come, my old school-fellow might be on one side and I on the other.
“I say,” said Bigley suddenly; “we’ve only undone one box, oughtn’t we to undo the other?”
“What, that?” I said, looking at a shorter smaller box on end in the corner behind the door.
“Yes.”
“Father didn’t say I was to.”
“But that looks as if it came from the same place.”
“Why, Big,” I cried eagerly, “that must have the uniforms in it.”