THE DRAGON'S TEETH
"Ah, that's the padding in our tunics. You should see us in the gray dawn taking our morning bath in a bucket."
It was a dreadful picture for the imagination. A skeleton, with its bones all loose most likely, bathing anyhow in a pail. There was a silence while we thought it over.
Now, ever since the cleaning-cauldron soldier had said that about taking Maidstone, Alice had kept on pulling at Oswald's jacket behind, and he had kept on not taking any notice. But now he could not stand it any longer, so he said, "Well, what is it?"
Alice drew him aside, or rather, she pulled at his jacket so that he nearly fell over backwards, and then she whispered, "Come along, don't stay parleying with the foe. He's only talking to you to gain time."
"What for?" said Oswald.
"Why, so that we shouldn't warn the other army, you silly," Alice said, and Oswald was so upset by what she said that he forgot to be properly angry with her for the wrong word she used.
"But we ought to warn them at home," she said; "suppose the Moat House was burned down, and all the supplies commandeered for the foe?"
Alice turned boldly to the soldier. "Do you burn down farms?" she asked.
"Well, not as a rule," he said, and he had the cheek to wink at Oswald, but Oswald would not look at him. "We've not burned a farm since—oh, not for years."
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