"They ride like tailors
squatting on their press-boards, and they salute like a parrot
scratching his head with his hind paw. A soldier is like a poet,
born, not made."
In leisurely fashion, Weldon stretched himself at full length and
drew out a slender pipe.
"Paddy, if you keep on, I'll fire a kopje at you," he threatened.
Paddy disdained the threat.
"Glory be, the kopjes be riveted down on the bottom end of them! But
it's the truth I'm telling. Half of these men is afraid of their
lives, when they're on a horse."
"The horses of South Africa are divided into two classes," Carew
observed sententiously; "the American ones that merely buck, and the
cross-eyed Argentine ones that grin at you like a Cheshire cat,
after they have done it. Both are bad for the nerves. Still, I'd
rather be respectfully bucked, than bucked and then laughed at,
after the catastrophe occurs. Paddy, my knife has been splitting
open its handle. What's to be done about it?"
"Let's see."
Bending forward, Carew drew the black-handled knife and fork from
the coils of his putties. In the orderly surroundings of Maitland
Camp, there was no especial need of his adopting the storage methods
of the trek; nevertheless, he had taken to the new idea with prompt
enthusiasm.
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