A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail.  Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants—­born and bred to better things.

The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket.  But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was....

Dam (alias Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings.  Having satisfied himself that to burnish further its glittering buttons would be to gild refined gold, he commenced a vigorous brushing—­for it was now his high ambition to “get the stick”—­in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade....  As he reached up to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim O’Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.

“What-ho, me bhoy,” he roared, “and how’s me natty Matty—­the natest foightin’ man in E Troop, which is sayin’ in all the Dhraghoons, which is sayin’ in all the Arrmy!  How’s Matty?”

“Extant,” replied Dam.  “How’s Shocky, the biggest liar in the same?”

As he extended his hand it was noticeable that it was much smaller than the hand of the smaller man to whom it was offered.  “Ye’ll have to plug and desthroy the schamin’ divvle that strook poor Patsy Flannigan, Matty,” said the Irishman.  “Ye must bate the sowl out of the baste before we go to furrin’ parts.  Loife is uncertain an’ ye moight never come back to do ut, which the Holy Saints forbid—­an’ the Hussars troiumphin’ upon our prosprit coorpses.  For the hanner an’ glory av all Dhraghoons, of the Ould Seconds, and of me pore bed-ridden frind, Patsy Flannigan, ye must go an’ plug the wicked scutt, Matty darlint.”

“It was Flannigan’s fault,” replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying.  “He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—­or trying to.  He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved.  He shouldn’t seek sorrow if he doesn’t want to find it, and he shouldn’t drink liquor he can’t carry.”

“And the Young Jock beat Patsy when drunk, did he?” murmured O’Shaughnessy, in tones of awed wonder.  “I riverince the man, for there’s few can beat him sober.  Knocked Patsy into hospital an’ him foightin’ dhrunk!  Faith, he must be another Oirish gintleman himself, indade.”