"He'll have to look out if he doesn't want to lose some things," said Colonel Gould, sharply; then answering a vexed look of Boy's mother, continued: "He was a _protégé_ of your husband's, I know--but he really has wind in his head. For his own sake it must be got out. I put him under arrest to-day, and told him squarely I'd have to block his promotion."
"What had he done?" She spoke quite fiercely.
"Cheek, as usual. It was over that escape from the camp. Haven't you heard? Viljeon, that cantankerous brute who gives so much trouble, managed to get out again last night. I wish it had been any one else--for he's half mad and dangerous. I'm glad the General has ordered the search-party to shoot at sight if he offers resistance."
Boy, in his white robe, his toy sword in his hand still, nodded his red aureole sagely.
"The Tommies down at the camp told _me_. He'sh just an awful brute, Vile John is. He is goin' to kill all the little English children he meets, 'cos--'cos they killed his: but that's a damned lie."
The calm deliberation of the last was so evidently imitative that Boy's mother smiled, despite a sudden pain at her heart.
"They died, dear, and so you must be very sorry for him. Think how sad I should be if--" The thought produced a sudden caress, a sudden glisten in her grey eyes. "Now, Boy of mine, let me take that thing off. Then you must go and lie down and sleep, for you'll have to keep wide awake half the night."
"Take care of my shword, Mummy, please!" said Boy, superbly, as, in unrobing, he shifted it from one hand to the other; "it's most dweadful sharp!"
"By George, it is," remarked Colonel Gould; "a trifle too sharp for safety."
"Is it?" said Boy's mother, anxiously. "Hirabul ought not--"
"It wasn't Hira," interrupted Boy. "It was Kunder sharped it, so as I could kill Vile John if I met him, like as my Daddy done over in Africa. Didn't you, Kunder?"
A figure squatting in a far corner rose and salaamed.
The speaker was an old man, slender, upright, unusually dark-skinned; this latter fact made his bare limbs look curiously youthful and lissom.
"Done it uncommonly well, too," assented Colonel Gould, feeling the edge. "Where did you learn the trick?"
"Your slave was once sword-sharpener by trade," was the submissive reply.