"Look here, La Mancha. That nine months sticks in my gizzard. I ought to have been punished, not you."
"Take off your serge!" By taking off the serge jacket which bore his double chevron as corporal, Dandy could surrender the protection given by his rank, and become a plain trooper like the Blackguard. The summons was a challenge to fight.
"I'll keep on my serge," said Dandy; "you're too big, Blackguard."
"Then don't talk rot about number five cell. Here's Pup La Mancha, my brother, deserting, and you and me and that fool Pocock overtaking him at Lane's stopping-place. Suppose you let him go, Shifty Lane reports you at headquarters. Suppose you don't let him go, you get my brother, the Pup, a year in the cells. Suppose I let him escape and take his place, I get nine months. After all, what's nine months? I shall be blazing drunk to-night, and maybe get it again!"
"Why can't you behave yourself?"
"Why should I, Dandy? Now you've got a mother, Dandy, who gets a letter from you every week.
"'Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on.'
She's the kindly light, I suppose, but mine went out. And you've got a girl, Dandy, who believes you're a brass saint with a tin halo, which you're not, and who loves you except when she happens to love some other Johnny, which is all the same thing. I've been in love, too, with heaps of girls, two or three at a time generally, hating each other like so many Antipopes. I have a photograph-album—you've seen it in my kit-bag—of all the girls I ever really loved, except a small collection which got burnt up in a hotel fire. I tried to be good, more or less, for each of them, except when they liked me bad; and even now I could be tolerably straight, with an occasional holiday to let off steam, if I had somebody who cared."
"I care," said Dandy moodily.
"Oh, you don't count. You're only a whiff, a spit, and a damn like a Russian cigarette."