Page:Stalky and co - Kipling (1908).djvu/262

250 'Got dam' near court-martialled and broke in Egypt in '84,' the Infant volunteered. 'I went out in the same trooper with him—as raw as he was. Only I showed it, and Stalky didn't.'

'What was the trouble?' said M'Turk, reaching forward absently to twitch my dress-tie into position.

'Oh, nothing. His colonel trusted him to take twenty Tommies out to wash, or groom camels, or something at the back of Suakin, and Stalky got embroiled with Fuzzies five miles in the interior. He conducted a masterly retreat and wiped up eight of 'em. He knew jolly well he'd no right to go out so far, so he took the initiative and pitched in a letter to his colonel, who was frothing at the mouth, complaining of the "paucity of support accorded to him in his operations." Gad, it might have been one fat brigadier slangin' another! Then he went into the Staff Corps.'

'That—is—entirely—Stalky,' said Abanazar from his armchair.

'You've come across him too?' I said.

'Oh yes,' he replied in his softest tones. 'I was at the tail of that that epic. Don't you chaps know?'

We did not—Infant, McTurk, and I; and we called for information very politely.

Twasn't anything,' said Tertius. 'We got into a mess up in the Khye-Kheen Hills a couple o' years ago, and Stalky pulled us through. That's all.' McTurk gazed at Tertius with all an Irishman's contempt for the tongue-tied Saxon.