“You’ve had to stop farm-burning because your people daren’t do it. They were afraid. You daren’t kill a spy. You daren’t shoot a spy when you catch him in your own uniform. You daren’t touch our loyall people in Cape Town! Your masters won’t let you. You will feed our women and children till we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can’t put your cowardly noses out of the towns you say you’ve occupied. _You_ daren’t move a convoy twenty miles. You think you’ve done something? You’ve done nothing, and you’ve taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn’t a nigger in South Africa that doesn’t obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog ’em, as I shall flog you.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin within two feet of Copper’s left, or pipe hand. “Yuss,” said Copper, “it’s a fair knock-out.” The fist landed to a hair on the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head crashed on the boulder behind. Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently at the fingernails. “No! Not a sign of it there,” he said. “’Is nails are as clean as mine—but he talks just like ’em, though. And he’s a landlord too! A landed proprietor! Shockin’, I call it.” The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose up and whispered: “If you open your head, I’ll bash it.” There was no suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. “Now walk in front of me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I’m only a third-class shot, so, if you don’t object, I’ll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly on your collar-button—coverin’ the serviceable vertebree. If your friends see us thus engaged, you pray—’ard.” Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick. “There’s a lot of things I could say to you,” Copper observed, at the close of the paroxysm, “but it doesn’t matter. Look ’ere, you call me ‘pore Tommy’ again.” The prisoner hesitated. “Oh, I ain’t goin’ to do anythin’ _to_ you. I’m recon-noiterin’ in my own. Say ‘pore Tommy’ ’alf-a-dozen times.” The prisoner obeyed. “_That’s_ what’s been puzzlin’ me since I ’ad the pleasure o’ meetin’ you,” said Copper. “You ain’t ’alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_—_pukka_ bazar chee-chee. _Pro_ceed.” “Hullo,” said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, “where did you round him up?” “On the top o’ yonder craggy mounting. There’s a mob of ’em sitting round their Bibles seventeen ’undred yards (you said it was seventeen ’undred?) t’other side—an’ I want some coffee.” He sat down on the smoke-blackened stones by the fire. “’Ow did you get ’im?” said McBride, professional humorist, quietly filching the English weekly from under Copper’s armpit. “On the chin—while ’e was waggin’ it at me.”