"He is getting warm on the subject," observed Middlemore. "Have a care Molineux, that the butt does not CHURN until in the end it becomes the BUTTER."
"Ha! ha! ha!" vociferated St. Clair, "good, excellent, the best you ever made, Middlemore."
"Gentlemen," persevered Raymond, in a tone, and with a gesture, of impatience, "this trifling will be deeply regretted by you all tomorrow; I repeat," he pursued, when he found he had at length succeeded in procuring silence, "you have long been pleased to select me as your butt, and while this was confined to my personal appearance, painful as I have sometimes found your humour, I could still endure it; but when I perceive those whom I have looked upon as friends and brothers, casting imputations upon my courage, I may be excused for feeling offended. You have succeeded in wounding my heart, and some of you will regret the hour when you did so. Another perhaps, would adopt a different course, but I am not disposed to return evil for evil. I wish to believe, that in all your taunts upon this subject, you have merely indulged your bantering humour—but not the less have you pained an honest heart. Tomorrow will prove that you have grievously wronged me, and I am mistaken, if you will not deeply regret it."
"Noonsense, noonsense, Raymoond, ma deer fallow; do na' heed the queeps of the hair-breened deevils. Ye see a neever tak any nootice o' them, but joost leet them ha' their way."
But Raymond stayed not—he hurried away across the snow towards a distant fire, which lighted the ruder bivouac of the adjutant and quarter master, and was there seen to seat himself, with the air of one who has composed himself for the night.
"What a silly fellow, to take the thing so seriously," said Molineux, half vexed at himself, half moved by the reproachful tone of Raymond's address.
"For God's sake, Grantham, call him back. Tell him we are ready to make any—every atonement for our offence," urged St. Clair.
"And I will promise never to utter another pun at his expense as long as I live," added Middlemore.
But before Henry Grantham, who had been a pained and silent witness of the scene, and who had already risen with a view to follow the wounded Raymond, could take a single step on his mission of peace, the low roll of the drum, summoning to fall in, warned them that the hour of action had already arrived, and each, quitting his fire, hastened to the more immediate and pressing duties of assembling his men, and carefully examining into the state of their appointments.
In ten minutes from the beating of the reveille— considerably shorn of its wonted proportions, as the occasion demanded—the bivouac had been abandoned, and the little army again upon their march. What remained to be traversed of the space that separated them from the enemy, was an alternation of plain and open forest, but so completely in juxtaposition, that the head of the column had time to clear one wood and enter a second before its rear could disengage itself from the first. The effect of this, by the dim and peculiar light reflected from the snow across which they moved, was picturesque in the extreme, nor was the interest diminished by the utter silence that had pervaded every part of the little army, the measured tramp of whose march, mingled with the hollow and unavoidable rumbling of the light guns, being the only sounds to be heard amid that mass of living matter. The Indians, with the exception of a party of scouts, had been the last to quit their rude encampment, and as they now, in their eagerness to get to the front, glided stealthily by in the deep snows on either side of the more beaten track by which the troops advanced, and so utterly without sound in their foot-fall, that they might rather have been compared to spirits of the wilds, than to human beings.