It began to rain when Jack was still two miles out of Salamanca, and he was wet and chilled when, having put up the stranger's horse, he entered the regidor's house and sought the general room, where, as he knew from the sounds of laughter proceeding from it, his friends and comrades were assembled. There was a universal shout as Jack pushed open the door.
"Here's the commissary-general!" cried a tall, fair-headed subaltern of seventeen years. "Look here, Jack, if this corn-chandler business of yours gets you promotion before me, I'll—I'll punch your head."
"Thanks! Pommy, my dear, unless you're careful, respectful, you know, you'll find your next billet will be a stable or a pig-stye; you can take your choice. A pig-stye would be the easier got, perhaps—this country teems with porkers; but there are plenty of mules too, and one more won't matter."
"All the same, Lumsden," said Harry Smith, a lieutenant of twenty-one, "I don't wonder Pomeroy's jealous. We didn't all have the luck to be babies in Spain! But let me introduce a friend of mine—an old school-chum. Lumsden—Dugdale, Percy Dugdale, otherwise the Grampus."
Jack found his right hand engulfed in a huge fist, and shaken almost to a jelly. It belonged to a tall young man in civilian dress, stout, massive, broad-shouldered, with a rubicund, open, ingenuous face, and a smile that bespoke friendliness at once.
"Heard of you," said Dugdale cordially. "Heard of your little bet. Reminds me of my wager with Blinks of Merton when I was a freshman. Bet me a pound to a polony I wouldn't screw up a proctor; loser to eat the polony. I won—and bought a champion polony in St. Aldate's. Blinks stood us a supper to be let off. Ha! ha!"
The Honourable Percy Dugdale's chuckle had a quality of its own. While it seldom resulted from what others would have regarded as wit or humour, it never failed to breed sympathetic laughter, and the room rang with appreciative merriment.
"What's this bet of yours, Lumsden?" asked Bob Shirley, lieutenant in Jack's company.
"Oh, a little affair with Pomeroy! He's so desperately cocksure of everything, and what is worse, he will talk, you know. Said he'd hold me at boxing, at wrestling, at swimming, at every mortal thing, including fencing, so I bet him before we left Alcantara that I'd give him points at them all, and we're going to begin with the foils."
"What are the stakes?" asked Shirley. "Why didn't I hear of this?"