The sun was just setting in a big, hot bed of red cloud, and the road to the
Civil Lines seemed to run straight into the sun's eye.
There was a little dot on the road. It grew and grew till it showed as a horse,
with a sort of gridiron thing on his back. The red cloud glared through the
bars of the gridiron. Some of the troopers shaded their eyes with their hands
and said:--"What the mischief as that there 'orse got on 'im!"
In another minute they heard a neigh that every soul--horse and man--in the
Regiment knew, and saw, heading straight towards the Band, the dead Drum-Horse
of the White Hussars!
On his withers banged and bumped the kettle-drums draped in crape, and on his
back, very stiff and soldierly, sat a bare-headed skeleton.
The band stopped playing, and, for a moment, there was a hush.
Then some one in E troop--men said it was the Troop-Sergeant-Major--swung his
horse round and yelled. No one can account exactly for what happened
afterwards; but it seems that, at least, one man in each troop set an example
of panic, and the rest followed like sheep. The horses that had barely put
their muzzles into the trough's reared and capered; but, as soon as the Band
broke, which it did when the ghost of the Drum-Horse was about a furlong
distant, all hooves followed suit, and the clatter of the stampede--quite
different from the orderly throb and roar of a movement on parade, or the rough
horse-play of watering in camp--made them only more terrified.
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