" (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)
"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from
the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper
rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two
years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at
a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers,
informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah
Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at
this hour.
"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your
picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by
twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at
the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"
Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might
still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his
fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.
"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."
"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little
'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"
"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since
I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection
to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"
"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private
Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet
another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly
larger than the first.
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