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“Don’t need no schoolin’ to know a renegid,” said Copper. He had made three yards down the hill–out of sight, unless they could see through rocks, of the enemy’s smoking party.

The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of “True Affection.” (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. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.

“Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki–eh?”

“Oh no, Sir,” said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for intoning it.

“Of course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen.” He spat aside and cleared his throat. “Because of that little promise, my father he moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm–a little place of twenty or thirty thousand acres, don’t–you–know.”

The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington squire’s, and Copper found himself saying: “I ought to. I’ve ‘elped burn some.”

“Yes, you’ll pay for that later. And he opened a store.”

“Ho! Shopkeeper was he?”

“The kind you call “Sir” and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik…. You see, in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father did. Then the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat them six times running. You know thatt–eh?”

“Isn’t what we’ve come ‘ere for.”

“But my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him–eh? Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. So–you see–he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That’s what it came to, Tommy–a prisoner of war. You know what that is–eh? England was too honourable and too gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father.”