The last of the sun threw the enormous shadow of a kopje over the little, anxious, wriggling group.
“Quit that,” said the Serjeant of a sudden. “You’re only making him worse. Hands up, prisoner! Now you get a holt of yourself, or this’ll go off.”
And indeed the revolver-barrel square at the man’s panting chest seemed to act like a tonic; he choked, recovered himself, and fell in between Copper and Pinewood.
As the picket neared the camp it broke into song that was heard among the officers’ tents:
’E sent us ’is blessin’ from London town,
(The beggar that kep’ the cordite down,)
But what do we care if ’e smile or frown,
The beggar that kep’ the cordite down?
The mildly nefarious
Wildly barbarious
Beggar that kept the cordite down!
Said a captain a mile away: “Why are they singing that? We haven’t had a mail for a month, have we?”
An hour later the same captain said to his servant: “Jenkins, I understand the picket have got a—got a newspaper off a prisoner to-day. I wish you could lay hands on it, Jenkins. Copy of the Times, I think.”
“Yes, Sir. Copy of the Times, Sir,” said Jenkins, without a quiver, and went forth to make his own arrangements.
“Copy of the Times,” said the blameless Alf, from beneath his blanket. “I ain’t a member of the Soldier’s Institoot. Go an’ look in the reg’mental Readin’-room—Veldt Row, Kopje Street, second turnin’ to the left between ’ere an’ Naauwport.”
Jenkins summarised briefly in a tense whisper the thing that Alf Copper need not be.