Page:Exploits of Brigadier Gerard.djvu/197

Rh of my eyes. My nose was full of a pungent smell, and I soon found that a strip of paper soaked in vinegar was fastened across my brow. At the other end of the room this terrible little man was sitting with his knee bare, and his elderly companion was rubbing it with some liniment. The latter seemed to be in the worst of tempers, and he kept up a continual scolding, which the other listened to with a gloomy face.

"Never heard tell of such a thing in my life," he was saying. "In training for a month with all the weight of it on my shoulders, and then when I get you as fit as a trout, and within two days of fighting the likeliest man on the list, you let yourself into a by-battle with a foreigner."

"There, there! Stow your gab!" said the other, sulkily. "You're a very good trainer, Jim, but you'd be better with less jaw."

"I should think it was time to jaw," the elderly man answered. "If this knee don't get well before next Wednesday, they'll have it that you fought a cross, and a pretty job you'll have next time you look for a backer."

"Fought a cross!" growled the other. "I've won nineteen battles, and no man ever so much as dared to say the word 'cross' in my hearin'. How the deuce was I to get out of it when the cove wanted the very clothes off my back?"