memoranda in a note-book:

"Lieutenant, I kent shtaendt ut no longer yet. Dot scheneral's horse he
git oats ag'in diesen abent, unt Ven he git noddings, unt he look, unt
look. He ot dot golt unt den ot me look, unt I _couldn't_ shtaendt ut,
lieutenant--"

And Preuss stopped short and winked hard and drew his ragged
shirt-sleeve across his eyes.

Neither could I "shtaendt ut." I jumped up and went to the colonel and
begged a hatful of his precious oats, not for my sake, but for Van's.
"Self-preservation is the first law of nature," and your own horse
before that of all the world is the cavalryman's creed. It was a heap to
ask, but Van's claim prevailed, and down the dark ravine "in the
gloaming" Preuss and I hastened with eager steps and two hats full of
oats; and that rascal Van heard us laugh, and answered with impatient
neigh. He knew we had not come empty-handed this time.

Next morning, when every sprig and leaf was glistening in the brilliant
sunshine with its frosty dew, Preuss led Van away up the ravine to
picket him on a little patch of grass he had discovered the day before,
and as he passed the colonel's fire a keen-eyed old veteran of the
cavalry service, who had stopped to have a chat with our chief, dropped
the stick on which he was whittling and stared hard at our attenuated
racer.

"Whose horse is that, orderly?" he asked.

"De _etschudant's_, colonel," said Preuss, in his labored dialect.

"The adjutant's! Where did he get him? Why, that horse is a runner!"
said Black Bill appreciatively.

And pretty soon Preuss came back to me, chuckling. He had not smiled for
six weeks.

"Ven he veels pully dis morning," he explained. "Dot Colonel Royle he
shpeak mit him unt pet him, unt Ven he laeff unt gick up mit his hint
lecks. He git vell bretty gwick yet."

Two days afterward we broke up our bivouac on French Creek, for every
blade of grass was eaten off, and pushed over the hills to its near
neighbor, Amphibious Creek, an eccentric stream, whose habit of diving
into the bowels of the earth at unexpected turns and disappearing from
sight entirely, only to come up surging and boiling some miles farther
down the valley, had suggested its singular name. "It was half land,
half water," explained the topographer of the first expedition that had
located and named the streams in these jealously-guarded haunts of the
red men. Over on Amphibious Creek we were joined by a motley gang of
recruits just enlisted