“Nine days ago, Punch! Nonsense! We can’t have been here nine days.”
“Oh yes, we can. It’s ten, because there was the day before, when he came first and doctored your leg.”
“Well, you seem very sure about it; but I think you are wrong.”
“I ain’t,” said Punch sturdily. “Lookye here,” and he thrust his hand into his pocket and brought it out again full of little pebbles.
“Well, what have they got to do with it?”
“Everything. I puts a fresh one into my pocket every day we stops.”
“What for?”
“To count up with. Each of those means two shillings that we owe the old gentleman for our prog. Knowing what a gentleman you are in your ideas, I says to myself you will want to pay him some day—a shilling apiece a day; that’s what I put it at, and that means we owe him a pound; and if we are going to stop here much longer I must try another dodge, especially if we are going on the march, for I don’t want to go tramping along with half a hundredweight of stones in my pocket.”
“You’re a rum fellow, Punch,” said Pen, smiling.
“That’s what my mother used to say; and I am glad of it. It does a fellow good to see you burst out laughing. Why, I haven’t seen you grin like that not since the day when I went down with the bullet in my back. Here, I know what I’ll do. I’ll chuck all these stones, and make a scratch for every day on the stock of my musket. ’Tain’t as if it was a Bri’sh rifle and the sergeant coming round and giving you hooroar for not keeping your arms in order. That would be a good way, wouldn’t it, because the musket-stock wouldn’t weigh any heavier when you had done than when you had begun.”