‘Not likely to be much difficulty about that, sir,’ said the adjutant.  ’Mulvaney’s explanations are only one degree less wonderful than his performances.  They say that when he was in the Black Tyrone, before he came to us, he was discovered on the banks of the Liffey trying to sell his colonel’s charger to a Donegal dealer as a perfect lady’s hack.  Shackbolt commanded the Tyrone then.’

’Shackbolt must have had apoplexy at the thought of his ramping war-horses answering to that description.  He used to buy unbacked devils, and tame them on some pet theory of starvation.  What did Mulvaney say?’

’That he was a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, anxious to “sell the poor baste where he would get something to fill out his dimples.”  Shackbolt laughed, but I fancy that was why Mulvaney exchanged to ours.’

‘I wish he were back,’ said the colonel; ’for I like him and believe he likes me.’

That evening, to cheer our souls, Learoyd, Ortheris, and I went into the waste to smoke out a porcupine.  All the dogs attended, but even their clamour—­and they began to discuss the shortcomings of porcupines before they left cantonments—­could not take us out of ourselves.  A large, low moon turned the tops of the plume-grass to silver, and the stunted camelthorn bushes and sour tamarisks into the likenesses of trooping devils.  The smell of the sun had not left the earth, and little aimless winds blowing across the rose-gardens to the southward brought the scent of dried roses and water.  Our fire once started, and the dogs craftily disposed to wait the dash of the porcupine, we climbed to the top of a rain-scarred hillock of earth, and looked across the scrub seamed with cattle paths, white with the long grass, and dotted with spots of level pond-bottom, where the snipe would gather in winter.

‘This,’ said Ortheris, with a sigh, as he took in the unkempt desolation of it all, ‘this is sanguinary.  This is unusually sanguinary.  Sort o’ mad country.  Like a grate when the fire’s put out by the sun.’  He shaded his eyes against the moonlight.  ‘An’ there’s a loony dancin’ in the middle of it all.  Quite right.  I’d dance too if I wasn’t so downheart.’

There pranced a Portent in the face of the moon—­a huge and ragged spirit of the waste, that flapped its wings from afar.  It had risen out of the earth; it was coming towards us, and its outline was never twice the same.  The toga, table-cloth, or dressing-gown, whatever the creature wore, took a hundred shapes.  Once it stopped on a neighbouring mound and flung all its legs and arms to the winds.

’My, but that scarecrow ’as got ’em bad!’ said Ortheris.  ’Seems like if ’e comes any furder we’ll ’ave to argify with ‘im.’

Learoyd raised himself from the dirt as a bull clears his flanks of the wallow.  And as a bull bellows, so he, after a short minute at gaze, gave tongue to the stars.