“Why, sergeant, you never means to say——”
“Nickles, I means just what I means. I may be right, and yet again I may be altogether wrong; as is the way of every man. ‘Let me alone’ is all I say. But if I was sure as you could hold your tongue, I might have something to say to you. Not of any account, you know; but still, something.”
“Now, sergeant, after all the thumps us has seen and been through together, you never would behave onhandsome to me.”
“Corporal Nickles, if you put it upon that footing, I cannot deny you. And mind you, now, my opinion is that this is a very queer case indeed.”
“Now, now, to think of that! Why, sergeant, you ought to be a general!”
“Nickles, no flattery; I am above it. Not but what I might have done so well as other people, if the will of the Lord had been so. Consarning, however, of this to-do, and a precious rumpus it will be, my opinion is that we don’t know half.”
Speaking thus, the sergeant nodded to the corporal impressively, and jerked his thumb towards the captain in front, and winked, and then began again.
“You see, corporal, my place is to keep both eyes wide open. There was a many things as struck me up at the old Don’s yonder. A carrying on in corners, and a going to lamps to read things, and a winking out of young ladies’ eyes, to my mind most unmilitary. But I might a’ thought that was all young people, and a handsome young chap going on as they will, only for what one of they dirty devils as drives them mules have said to me.”
“No, now, sergeant; never, now!”
“As true as I sit this here hoss, when us come back with the sun getting up, what did that pagan say to me? You seed him, corporal, a-running up, and you might have saved me the trouble, only you was nodding forward. ‘Senhor captain,’ he said to me, and the whites of his eyes was full of truth, ‘the young cavalier has been too soft.’ That was how I made out his country gibberish; the stuff they poor beggars are born to.”