“Hold your clapper, you spooney, and be damned to you!” exclaimed the angry veteran.—­“Had the Ingian fastened his paw upon your ugly neck as he did upon mine, all the pitiful life your mother ever put into you would have been spirited away from very fear; so you needn’t brag.”

“Sure, and if any of ye had a grain of spunk, ye would have fired, and freed a fellow from the clutch of them hell thieves,” muttered another of the men at the litter.  “All the time, the devil had me by the throat, swinging his tommyhawk about my head, I saw ye dancing up and down in the heavens, instead of being on your marrow bones on the common.”

“And didn’t I want to do it?” rejoined the first speaker.  “Ask Tom Winkler here, if the captain didn’t swear he’d cut the soul out of my body if I even offered so much as to touch the trigger of my musket.”

“Faith, and lucky he did,” replied his covering man (for the ranks had again joined), “since but for that, there wouldn’t be at this moment so much as a hair of the scalp of one of you left.”

“And how so, Mr. Wiseacre?” rejoined his comrade.

“How so!  Because the first shot that we fired would have set the devils upon them in right earnest—­and then their top-knots wouldn’t have been worth a brass farthing.  They would have been scalped before they could say Jack Robinson.”

“It was a hell of a risk,” resumed another of the litter men, “to give four men a chance of having their skull pieces cracked open like so many egg-shells, and all to get possession of a dead officer.”

“And sure, you beast,” remarked a different voice in a tone of anger, “the dead body of the brave captain was worth a dozen such rotten carcasses with all the life in them.  What matter would it be if ye had all been scalped?” Then with a significant half glance to the rear, which was brought up by their commander, on whose arm leaned the slightly wounded Johnstone, “Take care the captain doesn’t hear ye prating after that fashion, Will Burford.”

“By Jasus,” said a good-humoured, quaint looking Irishman, who had been fixing his eyes on the litter during this pithy and characteristic colloquy; “it sames to me, my boys, that ye have caught the wrong cow by the horns, and that all your pains has been for nothing at all, at all.  By the holy pope, ye are all wrong; it’s like bringing salt butter to Cork, or coals to your Newcastle, as ye call it.  Who the divil ever heard of the officer wearing ammunition shoes?”

The men all turned their gaze on that part of the vestment of the corpse to which their attention had been directed by this remark, when it was at once perceived, although it had hitherto escaped the observation even of the officers, that, not only the shoes were those usually worn by the soldiers, and termed ammunition or store shoes, but also, the trowsers were of the description of coarse grey, peculiar to that class.

“By the piper that played before Moses, and ye’re right, Dick Doherty,” exclaimed another Irishman; “sure, and it isn’t the officer at all!  Just look at the great black fist of him too, and never call me Phil Shehan, if it ever was made for the handling of an officer’s spit.”