“Strange, isn’t it, what he can have been doing here?” said the Colonial; “a small wound, isn’t it?”
“A pistol shot,” said the Englishman, closing the bosom.
“A pistol—”
The Englishman looked up at him with a keen light in his eye.
“I told you he would not kill that nigger.—See—here—” He took up the knife which had fallen from Peter Halket’s grasp, and fitted it into a piece of the cut leather that lay on the earth.
“But you don’t think—” The Colonial stared at him with wide open eyes; then he glanced round at the Captain’s tent.
“Yes, I think that—Go and fetch his great-coat; we’ll put him in it. If it is no use talking while a man is alive, it is no use talking when he is dead!”
They brought his great-coat, and they looked in the pockets to see if there was anything which might show where he had come from or who his friends were. But there was nothing in the pockets except an empty flask, and a leathern purse with two shillings in, and a little hand-made two-pointed cap.
So they wrapped Peter Halket up in his great-coat, and put the little cap on his head.
And, one hour after Peter Halket had stood outside the tent looking up, he was lying under the little tree, with the red sand trodden down over him, in which a black man and a white man’s blood were mingled.