“Ah then, don’t try to tease now! Will I bring a chair to help you get down?”
“You will not. Go in and get a nice comfortable chair ready for me, and Nizam Ali will help me get to it. And—I say—salts or something!”
That this last request was a heartless ruse on Brian’s part to get her out of the way while he was helped down and into the house was clear to her when she heard him whistling “Jim Crow” as she rummaged for the salts, and on returning breathless found him established in a long chair and again grinning. He rewarded her efforts so far as to take a tremendous sniff at the salts and declare that he was “kilt,” even before he thanked and dismissed the trooper, and then lay back in the chair and laughed quietly.
“Oughtn’t you go to bed, Brian?” asked Eveleen anxiously.
“Not dis nigger. Why, d’ye think I’d be here but that my old lad said I was making too much mess of his nice clean battlefield, and ordered me off? The sawbones who tied me up wanted to put me in a doolie, regardless of the other poor chaps waiting, but I says in my best English History manner, ‘Brother,’ says I, ‘their need is greater than mine,’ beckoned to Nizam Ali, and came away on my own four feet—leastways on little Bawn’s. And here I am.”
“I’m sure y’are over-excited. Y’oughtn’t be talking so much. Brian!” a horrible suspicion darting into her mind—“what about Ambrose?”
“Riding hard, when I saw him last, with a message from the General to the cavalry not to chase the enemy too far, lest they’d be cut off before the infantry could come up.”
“Then ’twas another victory?”
“Will you listen to the woman! Another victory? Of course it is—as big as Mahighar, if not bigger. But it’s got to have a name found for it, for did y’ever hear of such a name for a victory as Mussuck?”
“Mussuck? There’s some little bit of a village called that, I remember. So ’twas there you fought? But sure you were all going quite wrong when I saw you, then.”