“Is this true, Rake—­that you intentionally commit these freaks of misconduct to escape promotion?” he asked of the man when he stood alone with him in his place of confinement.

Rake flushed a little.

“Mischief’s bred in me, sir; it must come out!  It’s just bottled up in me like ale; if I didn’t take the cork out now and then, I should fly apieces!”

“But many a time when you have been close on the reward of your splendid gallantry in the field, you have frustrated your own fortunes and the wishes of your superiors by wantonly proving yourself unfit for the higher grade they were going to raise you to.  Why do you do that?”

Rake fidgeted restlessly, and, to avoid the awkwardness of the question, replied, like a Parliamentary orator, by a flow of rhetoric.

“Sir, there’s a many chaps like me.  They can’t help nohow busting out when the fit takes ’em.  ’Tain’t reasonable to blame ’em for it; they’re just made so, like a chestnut’s made to bust its pod, and a chicken to bust its shell.  Well, you see, sir, France, she knows that, and she says to herself, ’Here are these madcaps; if I keep ’em tight in hand I shan’t do nothing with ’em—­they’ll turn obstreperous and cram my convict-cells.  Now I want soldiers, I don’t want convicts.  I can’t let ’em stay in the Regulars, ’cause they’ll be for making all the army wildfire like ’em; I’ll just draft ’em by theirselves, treat ’em different, and let ’em fire away.  They’ve got good stuff in ’em, though too much of the curb riles ’em.’  Well, sir, she do that; and aren’t the Zephyrs as fine a lot of fellows as any in the service?  Of course they are; but if they’d been in England—­God bless her, the dear old obstinate soul!—­they’d have been drove crazy along o’ pipeclay and razors; she’d never have seed what was in ’em, her eyes are so bunged up with routine.  If a pup riot in the pack, she’s no notion but to double-thong him, and, a-course, in double-quick time, she finds herself obliged to go further and hang him.  She don’t ever remember that it may be only just along of his breeding, and that he may make a very good hound elseways let out a bit, though he’ll spoil the whole pack if she will be a fool and try to make a steady line-hunter of him, straight agin his nature.”

Rake stopped, breathless in his rhetoric, which contained more truth in it, as also more roughness, than most rhetoric does.

“You are right.  But you wander from my question,” said Cecil gently.  “Do you avoid promotion?”

“Yes, sir; I do,” said Rake, something sulkily; for he felt he was being driven “up a corner.”  “I do.  I ain’t not one bit fitter for an officer than that rioting pup I talk on is fit to lead them crack packs at home.  I should be in a strait-waistcoat if I was promoted; and as for the cross—­Lord, sir, that would get me into a world o’ trouble!  I should pawn it for a toss of wine the first day out, or give it to the first moukiera that winked her black eye for it!  The star put on my buttons suits me a deal better; if you’ll believe me, sir, it do."[*]