“I am afraid you won’t leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making the remark. “There’s no more to be got where that came from.” It was the certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.
“Leave any for him? Who’s him?” said my friend, stopping in his crunching of pie crust.
“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”
“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes! He don’t want no wittles.”
“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.
The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and the greatest surprise.
“Looked? When?”
“Just now.”
“Where?”
“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding asleep, and thought it was you.”
He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his first idea about cutting my throat had revived.
“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling; “and—and”—I was very anxious to put this delicately—“and with—the same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn’t you hear the cannon last night?”
“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.