Listen in the north, my boys, there’s trouble on the wind;
     Tramp o’ Cossack hooves in front, gray great-coats behind,
     Trouble on the Frontier of a most amazin’ kind,
       Trouble on the waters o’ the Oxus!

Then, as a table broke under the furious accompaniment—­

     Hurrah! hurrah! it’s north by west we go;
     Hurrah! hurrah! the chance we wanted so;
     Let ’em hear the chorus from Umballa to MosCOW,
     As we go marchin’ to the Kremling.

’Mother of all the saints in bliss and all the devils in cinders, where’s my fine new sock widout the heel?’ howled Horse Egan, ransacking everybody’s valise but his own.  He was engaged in making up deficiencies of kit preparatory to a campaign, and in that work he steals best who steals last.  ‘Ah, Mulcahy, you’re in good time,’ he shouted.  ’We’ve got the route, and we’re off on Thursday for a pic-nic wid the Lancers next door.’

An ambulance orderly appeared with a huge basket full of lint rolls, provided by the forethought of the Queen for such as might need them later on.  Horse Egan unrolled his bandage, and flicked it under Mulcahy’s nose, chanting—­

    ‘Sheepskin an’ bees’ wax, thunder, pitch, and plaster,
     The more you try to pull it off, the more it sticks the faster. 
     As I was goin’ to New Orleans—­

’You know the rest of it, my Irish American-Jew boy.  By gad, ye have to fight for the Queen in the inside av a fortnight, my darlin’.’

A roar of laughter interrupted.  Mulcahy looked vacantly down the room.  Bid a boy defy his father when the pantomime-cab is at the door; or a girl develop a will of her own when her mother is putting the last touches to the first ball-dress; but do not ask an Irish regiment to embark upon mutiny on the eve of a campaign; when it has fraternised with the native regiment that accompanies it, and driven its officers into retirement with ten thousand clamorous questions, and the prisoners dance for joy, and the sick men stand in the open, calling down all known diseases on the head of the doctor, who has certified that they are “medically unfit for active service.”  At even the Mavericks might have been mistaken for mutineers by one so unversed in their natures as Mulcahy.  At dawn a girls’ school might have learned deportment from them.  They knew that their colonel’s hand had closed, and that he who broke that iron discipline would not go to the front:  nothing in the world will persuade one of our soldiers when he is ordered to the north on the smallest of affairs that he is not immediately going gloriously to slay Cossacks and cook his kettles in the palace of the Czar.  A few of the younger men mourned for Mulcahy’s beer, because the campaign was to be conducted on strict temperance principles, but as Dan and Horse Egan said sternly, ’We’ve got the beer-man with us.  He shall drink now on his own hook.’

Mulcahy had not taken into account the possibility of being sent on active service.  He had made up his mind that he would not go under any circumstances, but fortune was against him.