Page:Under the Deodars - Kipling (1890).djvu/93

 and then came the news that the Tail Twisters must go into camp. The message flashed to the Hill station:—"Cholera—Leave stopped—Officers recalled". Alas, for the white gloves in the neatly soldered boxes, the rides and the dances and picnics that were to be, the love half-spoken and the debt unpaid? Without demur and without question, fast as tonga could fly or pony gallop, back to their Regiments and their Batteries, as though they were hastening to their weddings, fled the subalterns.

Bobby received his mandate on returning from a dance at Viceregal Lodge where he hadbut only the Haverley girl knows that Bobby had said or how many waltzes he had claimed for the next ball. Six in the morning saw Bobby at the tonga office in the drenching rain, the whirl of the last waltz still in his ears, and an intoxication due neither to wine nor waltzing in his brain.

"Good man!" shouted Deighton of the Horse Battery through the mists. "Whar you raise dat tonga? I'm coming with you. Ow! But I've a head and half. I did'nt sit out all night. They say the Battery's awful bad," and he hummed dolorously:

Leave the what at what-it's-name, Leave the flock without shelter, Leave the corpse uninterred, Leave the bride at the altar!"

"My faith! It'll be more bally corpse than bride, though, this journey. Jump in, Bobby!

On the Umballa platform waited a detachment of officers discussing the latest news from the stricken cantonment, and it was here that Bobby learned the real condition of the Tail Twisters.

"They went into camp," said an elderly Major recalled from the whist-tables at Mussoorie to a sickly Native Regiment, "they went into camp with two hundred and ten sick in carts. Two hundred and ten fever cases only, and the balance looking like so many ghosts with sore eyes. A Madras Regiment could have walked through 'em."