understood him if he had. The coloured boys don't know his language. I
expect he's one of those bloody fellows we hit the day we cleared the bush
out yonder; but how he got down that bank with his leg in the state it must
have been, I don't know. He didn't try to fight when they caught him; just
stared in front of him--fright, I suppose. He must have been a big
strapping devil before he was taken down.

"Well, I tell you, we'd just got him fixed up, and the Captain was just
going into his tent to have a drink, and we chaps were all standing round,
when up steps Halket, right before the Captain, and pulls his front lock--
you know the way he has? Oh, my God, my God, if you could have seen it!
I'll never forget it to my dying day!" The Colonial seemed bursting with
internal laughter. "He begins, 'Sir, may I speak to you?' in a formal kind
of way, like a fellow introducing a deputation; and then all of a sudden he
starts off--oh, my God, you never heard such a thing! It was like a boy in
Sunday-school saying up a piece of Scripture he's learnt off by heart, and
got all ready beforehand, and he's not going to be stopped till he gets to
the end of it."

"What did he say," asked the Englishman.

"Oh, he started, How did we know this nigger was a spy at all; it would be
a terrible thing to kill him if we weren't quite sure; perhaps he was
hiding there because he was wounded. And then he broke out that, after
all, these niggers were men fighting for their country; we would fight
against the French if they came and took England from us; and the niggers
were brave men, 'please sir'--(every five minutes he'd pull his forelock,
and say, 'please sir!')--'and if we have to fight against them we ought to
remember they're fighting for freedom; we shouldn't shoot wounded prisoners
when they were black if we wouldn't shoot them if they were white!' And