'For anything,' said Sharpe curtly.
'Come, you are mistaken,' replied Jack.
'Not at all,' said Sharpe doggedly.
'Excuse me,' said the young officer; 'as a sportsman and an ex-instructor in musketry, you may permit me to have some knowledge of fire-arms; but the one you refer to is for big game, and will neither stick nor jam like the Government rubbish issued to us in Egypt, and is based on the non-fouling principle.'
'Non-fowling? It will shoot any fowl you aim at,' replied Sharpe, mistaking his meaning; 'but you don't know what you are talking about.'
Elliot simply raised his eyebrows and stared at the speaker for a moment.
'You heard me?' added Sharpe, with an angry gleam in his eye.
Elliot turned to Skene and spoke of something else; but his cool and steady, yet inoffensive, stare, and his ignoring the last defiant remark, exasperated Hawkey Sharpe, who had—we have said—imbibed more wine than he was wont; and, like all men of his class, particularly felt the quiet contempt implied by the other's silence and utter indifference to his presence—a spirit of defiance very humiliating and difficult to grapple with, especially by the underbred; thus, 'while nursing his wrath to keep it warm,' Sharpe was determined to pursue a system of aggravation, and when Elliot remarked to Roland, in pursuance of some general observations, that shooting, even in the matter of black-game and muirgame, should never begin till October, as thousands of young partridges that are not fair game would escape being shot by gentlemen-poachers, or falling a prey when in the hedges and hassocks to the mere pot-hunter—Hawkey Sharpe contradicted him bluntly, without knowing what to urge on the contrary, and made some blundering statements about following young game into the standing corn, and how jolly it was to pot even young pheasants in the standing barley during the month of September.
'In these little matters, my good man, you are rather at variance with Colonel Hawker.'
'Who the devil is Hawker?' said Sharpe.