“Oh, he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a soul in the camp could have understood him if he had. The coloured boys don’t know his language. I expect he’s one of those bloody fellows we hit the day we cleared the bush out yonder; but how he got down that bank with his leg in the state it must have been, I don’t know. He didn’t try to fight when they caught him; just stared in front of him—fright, I suppose. He must have been a big strapping devil before he was taken down.

“Well, I tell you, we’d just got him fixed up, and the Captain was just going into his tent to have a drink, and we chaps were all standing round, when up steps Halket, right before the Captain, and pulls his front lock—you know the way he has? Oh, my God, my God, if you could have seen it! I’ll never forget it to my dying day!” The Colonial seemed bursting with internal laughter. “He begins, ‘Sir, may I speak to you?’ in a formal kind of way, like a fellow introducing a deputation; and then all of a sudden he starts off—oh, my God, you never heard such a thing! It was like a boy in Sunday-school saying up a piece of Scripture he’s learnt off by heart, and got all ready beforehand, and he’s not going to be stopped till he gets to the end of it.”

“What did he say,” asked the Englishman.