keeping the others back. He does it on purpose, firstly, and then,
too, he can't finish plucking himself in the morning, poor lad. He
wants ten hours for his flea-hunt, he's so finicking; and if he
can't get 'em, monsieur has the pip all day."

"Be damned to him," growls Lamuse. "I'd shift him out of bed if only
I was there! I'd wake him up with boot-toe, I'd--"

"I was reckoning, the other day," Cocon went on; "it took him seven
hours forty-seven minutes to come from thirty-one dug-out. It should
take him five good hours, but no longer."

Cocon is the Man of Figures. He has a deep affection, amounting to
rapacity, for accuracy in recorded computation. On any subject at
all, he goes burrowing after statistics, gathers them with the
industry of an insect, and serves them up on any one who will
listen. Just now, while he wields his figures like weapons, the
sharp ridges and angles and triangles that make up the paltry face
where perch the double discs of his glasses, are contracted with
vexation. He climbs to the firing-step (made in the days when this
was the first line), and raises his head angrily over the parapet.
The light touch of a little shaft of cold sunlight that lingers on
the land sets a-glitter both his glasses and the diamond that hangs
from his nose.

"And that Pepere, too, talk about a drinking-cup with
the bottom out! You'd never believe the weight of stuff he can let
drop on a single journey."

With his pipe in the corner, Papa Blaire fumes in two senses. You