“Well, don’t you want to know where we’re going?”
“Yus, sir; ’orrid.”
“Over the mountains to bring back a Ghoorka regiment, my lad.”
“Right, sir.”
“And by the hardest way we can find.”
“Something like them ways over the snow, like you goes for the bears and sheep, sir?”
“Yes: and harder ways still, Gedge: for to meet any of the people may mean—”
Bracy paused, and Gedge waited for him to end his sentence. But he waited in vain, till he was tired, and then finished it to himself, and in the way he liked best.
“May mean,” he said, and then paused—“having to put bullets through some o’ these savage savages, for I’m blest if I’m going to let ’em have the first shot at us. Yes,” he added, “savages; that’s what’s about their size. I never see such beasts. Yes, that’s what they are—wild beasts. I don’t call such things men. The best of it is, they thinks they’re so precious religious, and sticks theirselves up to pray every morning and every night, I’m blest!—praying!—and often as not with their knives and swords! Ugh! and phew! My word! it’s warm walking in these here coats. Wish I hadn’t got mine.”
Is thought electric, or magnetic, or telepathic, or scientific, some way or another, that so often it is communicated from one person to another free of cost, and without a form, or boy to leave it, and wait for an answer? Certainly it was in that, clear mountain air, which blew softly among the cedars in the valley, coming off the clear ice and dazzling snow from one side, getting warmed in hot sunshine, and then rising up the mighty slopes on the other side, to grow from pure transparency, in its vast distance and extent, to be of a wonderfully delicious amethystine blue.