“You shut your eyes and go to sleep,” cried Pen angrily.
“No,” said the boy, speaking more strongly now. “I aren’t a baby, and I know what I’m saying. You tell me you won’t let them have me, and then I will go to sleep; and then if I don’t wake up no more—”
“What!” cried Pen, speaking with a simulated anger, “you won’t be such a coward as to go and leave me all alone here?”
The boy started; his eyes brightened a little, and he gazed half-wonderingly in his companion’s face.
“I—I didn’t think of that, comrade,” he faltered. “I was thinking I was going like some of our poor chaps; but I don’t want to shirk. There, I’ll try not.”
“Of course you will,” said Pen harshly. “Now then, try and have a nap.”
The boy closed his eyes, and in less than a minute he was breathing steadily and well, but evidently suffering now and then in his sleep, for the hand that clasped Pen’s gave a sudden jerk at intervals.
Quite an hour, during which the watcher did not stir, till there was a sharper twitch and the boy’s eyes opened, to look wonderingly in his companion’s as if he could not recall where he was.
“Have a little water now, Punch?”
“Drop,” he said; but the drop proved to be a thirsty draught, and he spoke quite in his senses now as he put a brief question.