Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/693

Rh except supposing that somebody had struck me a smart blow, if I had not felt weak and seen myself covered with spouting blood, and, at the same instant of time, seen Miss Maryon tearing her dress and binding it with Mrs. Fisher's help round the wound.

They called to Tom Packer, who was scouring by, to stop and guard me for one minute, while I was bound, or I should bleed to death in trying to defend myself. Tom stopped directly, with a good sabre in his hand. In that same moment—all things seem to happen in that same moment, at such a time—half-a-dozen had rushed howling at Sergeant Drooce. The sergeant, steping back against the wall, stopped one howl forever with such a terrible blow, and waited for the rest to come on, with such a wonderfully unmoved face, that they stopped and looked at him.

"See him now!" cried Tom Packer. "Now, when I could cut him out! Gill! Did I tell you to mark my word?"

I implored Tom Packer in the Lord's name, as well as I could in my faintness, to go to the sergeant's aid.

"I hate and detest him," says Tom, moodily wavering. "Still he is a brave man." Then he calls out, "Sergeant Drooce, Sergeant Drooce! Tell me you have driven me too hard, and are sorry for it."

"No. I won't."

"Sergeant Drooce!" cries Tom, in a kind of agony.

"I have passed my word that I would never save you from death, if I could, but would leave you to die. Tell me you have driven me too hard and are sorry for it, and that shall go for nothing."

One of the group laid the sergeant's bald bare head open. The sergeant laid him dead.

"I tell you," says the sergeant, breathing a little short, and waiting for the next attack, "No. I won't. If you are not man enough to strike for a fellow-soldier because he wants help, and because of nothing else, I'll go into the other world and look for a better man."

Tom swept upon them, and cut him out. Tom and he fought their way through another knot of them, and sent them flying, and came over to where I was beginning again to feel, with inexpressible joy, that I had got a sword in my hand.