And Wanton Wully, when he was not bell-ringing, or cleaning the streets, or lounging on the quay to keep tally of ships that never came, being at ports more propinque to the highways of the world, where folks are making fortunes and losing much innocent diversion, wrought—as he would call it—in the Dyce's garden. Not a great gardener, admittedly, for to be great in versatility is of necessity to miss perfection in anything, so that the lowest wages in the markets of the world are for the handy man. But being handy is its own reward, carrying with it the soothing sense of self-sufficiency, so we need not vex ourselves for Wully. As he said himself, he “did the turn” for plain, un-ornamental gardening, though in truth he seemed to think he did it best when sitting on his barrow trams, smoking a thoughtful pipe and watching the glad spring hours go by at a cost of sixpence each to the lawyer who employed him.
Bud often joined him on the trams, and gravely listened to him, thinking that a man who did so many different and interesting things in a day was wise and gifted beyond ordinary. In the old and abler years he had been 'a soldier, and, nursing flowers nowadays, his mind would oft incongruously dwell on scenes remote and terribly different where he had delved in foreign marl for the burial of fallen comrades.
“Tell me Inkerman again, Mr. Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I'll shoo off the birds from the blub-flow-ers.
“I'll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe, and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and chasing birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the mischief with them birds! the garden's fair polluted wi' them! God knows what's the use o' them except for chirping, chirping—Tchoo! off wi' ye at once, or I'll be after ye!—Ay, ay, Inkerman. It was a gey long day, I'm tellin' ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter, slaughter a' the time; me wi' an awfu' hacked heel, and no' a bit o' anything in my stomach. A nesty, saft day, wi' a smirr o' rain. We were as black as—as black as—as—”
“As black as the Earl o' Hell's waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I mind the very words.”
“I only said that the once,” said Wully, shocked at her glibness in the uptake. “And it's not a thing for the like o' you to say at all; it's only the word o' a rowdy sodger.”
“Well, ain't I the limb! I'll not say it again,” promised the child; “you needn't look as solemn's the Last Trump. Go on, go on!”
“As black as a ton o' coal, wi; the creesh o' the cartridges and the poother; it was the Minié gun, ye ken. And the Rooshians would be just ower there between the midden and the cold-frame, and we would be coming doon on them—it micht be ower the sclates o' Rodger's hoose yonder. We were in the Heavy Diveesion, and I kill't my first man that I kent o' aboot where the yellow crocus is. Puir sowl! I had nae ill-will to the man, I'll guarantee ye that; but we were baith unloaded when we met each other, and it had to be him or me.”
He paused and firmed his mouth until the lips were lost among the puckers gathered round them, a curious glint in his eyes.
“Go on!” cried Bud, sucking in her breath with a horrid expectation, “ye gie'd him—ye gie'd him—”