“Tell me Inkermann again, Mr Wanton,” Bud would say, “and I’ll shoo off the birds from the blub-flowers.”
“I’ll do that, my dearie!” he would answer, filling another pipe, and glad of an excuse to rest from the gentle toil of raking beds and chasing the birds that nipped the tips from peeping tulip leaves. “To the mischief with them birds! the garden’s fair polluted wi’ them! God knows what’s the use o’ them except for chirping, chirping— Choo! off wi’ ye at once or I’ll be after ye!— Ay, ay, Inkermann. It was a gey long day, I’m tellin’ ye, from a quarter past six till half-past four; slaughter, slaughter a’ the time: me wi’ an awfu’ hacked heel, and no’ a bit o’ anything in my stomach. A nesty saft day, wi’ a smirr o’ rain. We were as black as—as black as—as—”
“As black as the Earl o’ Hell’s waistcoat,” Bud prompted him. “Go on! I mind the very words.”
“I only said that the once, when I lost the place,” said Wully, shocked at her glibness in the uptake. “And it’s not a thing for the like o’ you to say at all; it’s only the word o’ a rowdy sodger.”
“Well, ain’t I the limb! I’ll not say it again,” promised the child; “you needn’t look as solemn’s the Last Trump; go on, go on!”
“As black as a ton o’ coal, wi’ the creesh o’ the cartridges and the poother; it was the Minie gun, ye ken. And the Rooshians would be just ower there between the midden and the cold frame, and we would be coming down on them—it micht be ower the sclates o’ Rodger’s hoose yonder. We were in the Heavy Diveesion, and I kill’t my first man that I kent o’ about where the yellow crocus is. Puir sowl! I had nae ill-will to the man, I’ll guarantee ye that but we were baith unloaded when we met each other, and it had to be him or me.”
He paused and firmed his mouth until the lips were lost among the puckers gathered round them, a curious glint in his eyes.
“Go on!” cried Bud, sucking in her breath with a horrid expectation; “ye gie’d him—ye gie’d him—”
“I gie’d him—I tell’t ye what I gie’d him before. Will I need to say’t again?”
“Yes,” said Bud, “for that’s your top note.”
“I gie’d him—I gie’d him the—the BAGGONET!” cried the gardener, with a sudden, frightful, furious flinging of the arms, and then—oh, silly Wully Oliver!—began to weep, or at least to show a tear. For Bud had taught him to think of all that lay beyond that furious thrust of the bayonet—the bright brave life extinguished, the mother rendered childless, or the children fatherless, in some Russian home.