I am thankful to this day to those men whom fools and bigots call
savages. They taught me to pray again.
"Man Captain," said the one who had English, as we walked away in a body,
"ye wad mak' a gran' meenister."
I could not withhold a smile, but before I could reply there was a
scattered rattle of shots from the dip. Looking around, I saw a body of
enemy horse on the lower hill across the valley to my left.
We were overtaken. We should have to fight.
CHAPTER XXIV
MY LORD BROCTON PILES UP HIS ACCOUNT
On the tenth day of my captivity, hope glimmered for the first time. When
a man has been penned up in a dull room for ten days, with
half-a-hundred-weight of rusty iron shackling his wrists and ankles, with
poor food, and little of it at that, to eat, he can extract comfort out of
a trifle.
In my case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far
she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals
either without saying a word or, at best, snapping me up and saying that I
got far better treatment than a rebel deserved.
She never told me her name, and I never learned it from any other source,
so 'she' she must remain for me and my tale.
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