Some five years
before, the Colonel commanding had looked into the fourteen fearless eyes of
seven plump and juicy subalterns who had all applied to enter the Staff Corps,
and had asked them why the three stars should he, a colonel of the Line,
command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned
tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black
Regiments. He was a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took
measures [with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumor
went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to the Staff
Corps, had many and varied trials to endure. However. a regiment had just as
much right to its own secrets as a woman.
When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his place among the Tail Twisters, it
was gently hut firmly borne in upon him that the Regiment was his father and
his mother and his indissolubly wedded wife, and that there was no crime under
the canopy of heaven blacker than that of bringing shame on the Regiment,
which was the best-shooting, best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest, most
illustrious, and in all respects most desirable Regiment within the compass of
the Seven Seas. He was taught the legends of the Mess Plate from the great
grinning Golden Gods that had come out of the Summer Palace in Pekin to the
silver-mounted markhor-horn snuff-mull presented by the last C.
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