Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/40

 and he'd kid you. He can ride. 'Wish some of you other gentlemen could ride as well. He is playing the dark horse—that's what he's doing, and be dd to him!" Well, Tick was as innocent as a baby when he rolled off on to the tan. I noticed that he fell somehow as if he knew the hang of the trick; and Harkness passed him out of Riding School on the strength of that fall. He sat square enough on parade, and pretended to be awfully astonished. Well, we didn't think anything of that till he came out one night in the billiard line at Black Pool, and scooped the whole Mess. Then we began to mistrust him, but he swore it was all by a fluke. We used to chaff him fearfully; and draw him about four nights out of the seven. Once we drugged his chargers with opium overnight; and Tick found 'em asleep and snoring when he wanted to go on parade.

He was a trifle wrathy over this; and the Colonel didn't soothe him by giving him the rough edge of his tongue for allowing his horses to go to sleep at unauthorized hours. We didn't mean to do more than make the chargers a bit bobbery next morning; but something must have gone wrong with the opium. To give the Beast his due, he took everything very well indeed; and never minded how often we pulled his leg and made things lively for him. We never liked him, though. 'Can't like a man who always does everything with a little bit up his sleeve. It's not fair.

Well one day in July Tick took three months' leave and cleared out somewhere or other—to Cashmere I think. He didn't tell us where, and we weren't very keen on knowing.

We missed him at first, for there was no one to draw. Our regiment don't take kindly to that sort of thing. We are most of us hard as nails; and we respect each other's little weaknesses.

About October Tick turned up with a whole lot of heads and horns and skins—for it seemed that the beggar could shoot as well as he did most other things,—and the Mess began to sit up at the prospect of having some more fun out of him. But Tick was an altered man. 'Never saw anyone so changed. 'Hadn't an ounce of bukh or bounce left about him; never betted; knocked off what little liquor he used to take; got rid of his ponies, and went mooning about like an old ghost. Stranger still, he seemed to lay himself out in a quiet sort of way to be a popular man; and, in about three weeks' time we began to think we had misjudged him, and that he wasn't half such a bad fellow after all. The Colonel began the movement in his