At the foot of the long
slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added
personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private
Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards....
"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as
he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept
Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few
graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten
seconds.
"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an
obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private
Copper's rifle. "Thank _you_. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out
yonder. You've eleven--eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel
with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep.
It is demoralising to both sides--eh?"
Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of
guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger
was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence
that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same
offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen
years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket,
out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down,
folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been
reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine--like the rest
of them--eh?"
"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had
never given to the young squire, "are a renegid.
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