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I quaffed half a pint at a gulp, and said "Rather!" when asked if I would have more. "Glad you liked it," said Dumble. "I must confess that that was my third." The General, suave, keen-eyed, and pleasant-spoken, came up with the colonel and the brigade-major as we got back to the battery.
It was said of him that he preferred to take cash for telling a lie rather than credit for telling the truth. Dumble, as we knew, had sold the Baron one horse and saddle, one Frisian-Holstein cow, and an incubator.
Sir Henry made a wry face. "It seems to me that your outlook is a trifle superficial, dear," he grumbled. "However now what the dickens is the matter?" The door had been opened by Mills, with his usual smoothness, but Jimmy Dumble, out of breath and excited, pushed his way into the room. "Hullo? What is it, Jimmy?" his patron demanded. "Beg your pardon, sir," was the almost incoherent reply.
"Aw," said Dumble, who had expected nothing, and was rather embarrassed than otherwise by their generosity, "thank 'ee kindly, sirs, and young leddies; there wasn't no 'casion to give us nothing; but thank 'ee very much all the same, and 'nother time we'll be glad to 'blige 'ee with 'nother lift." "Thank you very much," said Dan.
At a dismal saloon, where water was nearly as expensive and quite as bad as the whisky, we learned that a bright bay colt with a white star and stocking, and another with a white nose, had been seen early that morning. Old man Dumble gleaned more. "We're dealing with a tenderfoot and a stranger to the saloon-keeper," he said, as we struck into the sage-brush wilderness.
"We picked that place for a mess" pointing to the broken hut "and five minutes later a shell crashed into it. There's a dead horse round the corner ..." "Have you been shelled much at the battery?" demanded the major. "We had two sergeants killed a quarter of an hour ago, sir.... Captain Dumble is arranging to shift the guns a bit north of the present position, do you approve of that, sir?"
"What on earth use should I be in a land appointment? Why, no one could read my writing, and my nautical science is entirely out of date. Why a cadet at Osborne could floor me in no time." "You refuse to let me write, then?" she persisted. "Absolutely." "You intend to go on that fishing expedition with Jimmy Dumble to-morrow?" "Wouldn't miss it for anything," he confessed.
There was a long wait while a line of French waggons moved out of our way. Some of the men were yawning with the sleepiness that comes from being cold as well as tired. We were now on the outskirts of a village that lay four miles from Varesnes. "What do you say if we stop at this place and go on after a rest?" said Dumble. I agreed.
He paused and wiped his streaming face with his handkerchief. "What were our infantry doing?" the colonel interrogated. "There were only small parties of them, sir, and very scattered," went on Dumble. "The officer and myself, with a dozen men, got along a trench to within thirty yards of some Huns and fired on them. But another party, from almost behind us, came along and bombed us back.
"They've kept their condition well, considering the work they have had to do this last four days," remarked Dumble. "I hope the Supply Column won't fail us, though. The horses want as much corn as they can get now." "Well, the A.S.C. have had plenty of practice getting up supplies this last three years.
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