“What, my father ordering that poor fellow to be shot? Yes, it would have been horrible indeed.”
“But would the skipper have ordered him to be shot, Mr Poole, sir?” said Winks thoughtfully.
“I’m afraid so, Chips.”
“Humph! Don’t seem like him. He bullies us chaps pretty sharp sometimes, and threatens, and sometimes the words he says don’t smell of violets, nor look like precious stones; but I can’t see him having a chap shot because he was a spy. Why, it’d be like having an execution without a judge.”
“Yes, very horrible,” said Fitz, “but it’s time of war; as in the Duke of Wellington’s time,—martial law.”
“Who’s him, sir? You mean Blucher—him as got into trouble over the Army boots?”
“No, no,” said Poole. “Mr Burnett means the law that is used in fighting times when a Commander-in-chief acts as judge.”
“Oh! All right, sir. But it sounds a bit harbitrary, as they calls it in the newspapers. I should have thought a hundred dozen would have been punishment enough, without putting a stinguisher on a man right out. I suppose it’s all right, but I wouldn’t have given it to him so hot as that. Well, I’m glad he come, because now we know what we’ve got to expect to-morrow. Do you know what I should like if I could have three wishes same as you reads of in the little story-books?”
“Camel to come up now with one of his hot steak-and-kidney puddings boiled in a basin?”
“Tlat!” ejaculated the carpenter, with a smack of the lips. “And the inions a-smelling looshus a hundred yards away. Nay, it warn’t that.”