Meantime the condemned rebel had swallowed half the pigeon-pie and drunk a pint of ale. I watched him in polite surprise, and the thought came to me that if his fighting was as fierce as was his appetite, six men would be none too many to retake him. Having at last dispatched his meal, he said:
“Madam, do you know that I feel quite wonderfully better? Fit for stratagems and devilry, in fact. And, lord knows, they’ll be required.”
“They will, indeed,” says I. “But stratagems—you talk of stratagems, now let me think of ’em.”
I seldom lacked for a certain fertility in inventions. I began to put it to the test. To sit tamely down and watch this fine lad perish was by no means what I was prepared to do. Having pledged myself so deeply to his affair, I would see him through with it.
“Madam,” he broke in on my thoughts, “two feet of straight and honest steel is worth a mile of strategy. Give me a sword, and bother your head no more about me.”
“’Tis bloody mindedness,” says I; “and you such a tender, handsome boy!”
“I am not tender; I am not handsome; I am not a boy,” says he.
“You are the very handsomest lad I ever saw,” says I, mischievously, “and Mrs. Polly Emblem knows it also. She looks on you as sweetly as though you were a corporal.”
“Bah!” he cries, “do you suppose, madam, that I will let a parcel of women pet me like a terrier pup. I was born for better things, I hope.”
“For the whipping-post, the pillory, the Tolbooth, you saucy rogue,” says I, laughing at his anger, and the way he treated one of the foremost ladies in the State. “But you know you are very handsome, now,” says I, in a very coaxing manner.