, they opened their tight buttons, shifted their helmets, and began
to joke or to swear as the humor took them; the more careful slipping
off and easing girths and curbs. A good trooper values his mount exactly
as much as he values himself, and believes, or should believe, that the
two together are irresistible where women or men, girl's or gun's, are
concerned.

Then the Orderly-Officer gave the order:--"Water horses," and the
Regiment loafed off to the squadron-troughs, which were in rear of
the stables and between these and the barracks. There were four huge
troughs, one for each squadron, arranged en echelon, so that the whole
Regiment could water in ten minutes if it liked. But it lingered for
seventeen, as a rule, while the Band played.

The band struck up as the squadrons filed off the troughs and the men
slipped their feet out of the stirrups and chaffed each other. The sun
was just setting in a big, hot bed of red cloud, and the road to the
Civil Lines seemed to run straight into the sun's eye. There was a
little dot on the road. It grew and grew till it showed as a horse, with
a sort of gridiron thing on his back. The red cloud glared through the
bars of the gridiron. Some of the troopers shaded their eyes with their
hands and said:--"What the mischief as that there 'orse got on 'im!"

In another minute they heard a neigh that every soul--horse and man--in
the Regiment knew, and saw, heading straight towards the Band, the dead
Drum-Horse of the White Hussars!

On his withers banged and bumped the kettle-drums draped in crape, and
on his back, very stiff and soldierly, sat a bare-headed skeleton.

The band stopped playing, and, for a moment, there was a hush.

Then some one in E troop--men said it was the
Troop-Sergeant-Major--swung his horse round and yelled. No one can
account exactly for what happened afterwards; but it seems that, at
least, one man in each troop set an example of panic, and the rest
followed like sheep. The horses that had barely put their muzzles into
the trough's reared and capered; but, as soon as the Band broke, which
it did when the ghost of the Drum-Horse was about a furlong distant, all
hooves followed suit, and the clatter of the stampede--quite different
from the orderly throb and roar of a movement on parade, or the rough
horse-play of watering in camp--made them only more terrified. They felt
that the men on their backs were afraid of something. When horses once
know THAT,