“My certy, ye dinna let the grass grow under your feet,” said the Highlander; and he added, “If ye want to run errands, laddie, ye can come back again.”
It was the beginning of a fresh life for John Broom. With many other idle or homeless boys he now haunted the barracks, and ran errands for the soldiers. His fleetness of foot and ready wit made him the favorite. Perhaps, too, his youth and his bright face and eyes pleaded for him, for British soldiers are a tender-hearted race.
He was knocked about, but never cruelly, and he got plenty of coppers and broken victuals, and now and then an old cap or a pair of a boots, a world too large for him. His principal errands were to fetch liquor for the soldiers. In arms and pockets he would sometimes carry a dozen bottles at once, and fly back from the canteen or public-house without breaking one.
Before the summer was over he was familiar with every barrack-room and guard-room in the place; he had food to eat and coppers to spare, and he shared his bits with the mongrel dogs who lived, as he did, on the good-nature of the garrison.
It must be confessed that neatness was not among John Broom’s virtues. He looped his rags together with bits of string, and wasted his pence or lost them. The soldiers standing at the bar would often give him a drink out of their pewter-pots. It choked him at first, and then he got used to it, and liked it. Some relics of Miss Betty’s teaching kept him honest. He would not condescend to sip by the way out of the soldiers’ jugs and bottles as other errand-boys did, but he came to feel rather proud of laying his twopence on the counter, and emptying his own pot of beer with a grimace to the by-standers through the glass at the bottom.
One day he was winking through the froth of a pint of porter at the canteen sergeant’s daughter, who was in fits of laughing, when the pewter was knocked out of his grasp, and the big Highlander’s hand was laid on his shoulder and bore him twenty or thirty yards from the place in one swoop.
“I’ll trouble ye to give me your attention,” said the Highlander, when they came to a standstill, “and to speak the truth. Did ye ever see me the worse of liquor?”
John Broom had several remembrances of the clearest kind to that effect, so he put up his arms to shield his head from the probable blow, and said, “Yes, McAlister.”
“How often?” asked the Scotchman.
“I never counted,” said John Broom; “pretty often.”