Mercy of God I'm splendidly drunk. Yes, hell. 'Lasciate ogni speranza,' sweet Amaryllis. I am Morag of the Misty Way. Mos' misty. Milky Way. Yesh. Milk Punchy Way." …
"I'll give you all the punch you'll want, in abaht two ticks if you don't chuck it—you blarsted edjucated flea," warned Hawker, half rising.
Dam got up and pulled on his cloak preparatory to helping the o'er-taken one to bed, as a well-aimed ammunition boot took the latter nearly on the ear.
Struggling to his feet with the announcement that he was "the King's fair daughter, weighed in the balance and found—devilish heavy and very drunk," the unhappy youth lurched and fell upon the outraged Hawker—who struck him a cruel blow in the face.
At the sound of the blow and heavy fall, Dam turned, saw the blood—and went Stukeley-mad. Springing like a tiger upon Hawker he dragged him from his cot and knocked him across it. In less than a minute he had twice sent him to the boards, and it took half-a-dozen men on either side to separate the combatants and get them to postpone the finish till the morning. That night Dam dreamed his dream and, on the morrow, behind the Riding-School, and in fifteen rounds, became, by common consent, champion bruiser of the Queen's Greys—by no ambition of his own.
And so—as has been said—Trooper Henry Hawker ungrudgingly referred Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy to him in the matter of reducing the pride of the Young Jock who had dared to "desthroy" a dragoon.
Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy—in perfect-fitting glove-tight scarlet stable-jacket (that never went near a stable, being in fact the smart shell-jacket, shaped like an Eton coat, sacred to "walking-out" purposes), dark blue overalls with broad white stripe, strapped over half-wellington boots adorned with glittering swan-neck spurs, a pill-box cap with white band and button, perched jauntily on three hairs—also looked what he was, the ideal heavy-cavalry man, the swaggering, swashbuckling trooper, beau sabreur, good all round and all through….
The room in which these worthies and various others (varying also in dress, from shirt and shorts to full review-order for Guard) had their being, expressed the top note and last cry—or the lowest note and deepest groan—of bleak, stark utilitarianism. Nowhere was there hint or sign of grace and ornament. Bare deal-plank floor, bare white-washed walls, plank and iron truckle beds, rough plank and iron trestle tables, rough plank and iron benches, rough plank and iron boxes clamped to bedsteads, all bore the same uniform impression of useful ugliness, ugly utility. The apologist in search of a solitary encomium might have called it clean—save around the hideous closed stove where muddy boots, coal-dust, pipe-dottels, and the bitter-end of five-a-penny "gaspers"18 rebuked his rashness.
A less inviting, less inspiring, less home-like room for human habitation could scarce be found outside a jail. Perhaps this was the less inappropriate in that a jail it was, to a small party of its occupants—born and bred to better things.
The eye was grateful even for the note of cheer supplied by the red cylindrical valise on the shelf above each cot, and by the occasional scarlet tunic and stable-jacket. But for these it had been, to the educated eye, an even more grim, grey, depressing, beauty-and-joy-forsaken place than it was….
Dam (alias Trooper D. Matthewson) placed the gleaming helmet upon his callous straw-stuffed pillow, carefully rubbed the place where his hand had last touched it, and then took from a peg his scarlet tunic with its white collar, shoulder-straps and facings. Having satisfied himself that to burnish further its glittering buttons would be to gild refined gold, he commenced a vigorous brushing—for it was now his high ambition to "get the stick"—in other words to be dismissed from guard-duty as reward for being the best-turned-out man on parade…. As he reached up to his shelf for his gauntlets and pipe-clay box, Trooper Phelim O'Shaughnessy swaggered over with much jingle of spur and playfully smote him, netherly, with his cutting whip.
"What-ho, me bhoy," he roared, "and how's me natty Matty—the natest foightin' man in E Troop, which is sayin' in all the Dhraghoons, which is sayin' in all the Arrmy! How's Matty?"
"Extant," replied Dam. "How's Shocky, the biggest liar in the same?"
As he extended his hand it was noticeable that it was much smaller than the hand of the smaller man to whom it was offered. "Ye'll have to plug and desthroy the schamin' divvle that strook poor Patsy Flannigan, Matty," said the Irishman. "Ye must bate the sowl out of the baste before we go to furrin' parts. Loife is uncertain an' ye moight never come back to do ut, which the Holy Saints forbid—an' the Hussars troiumphin' upon our prosprit coorpses. For the hanner an' glory av all Dhraghoons, of the Ould Seconds, and of me pore bed-ridden frind, Patsy Flannigan, ye must go an' plug the wicked scutt, Matty darlint."
"It was Flannigan's fault," replied Dam, daubing pipe-clay on the huge cuff of a gauntlet which he had drawn on to a weird-looking wooden hand, sacred to the purposes of glove-drying. "He got beastly drunk and insulted a better man than himself by insulting his Corps—or trying to. He called a silly lie after a total stranger and got what he deserved. He shouldn't seek sorrow if he doesn't want to find it, and he shouldn't drink liquor he can't carry."
"And the Young Jock beat Patsy when drunk, did he?" murmured O'Shaughnessy, in tones of awed wonder. "I riverince the man, for there's few can beat him sober. Knocked Patsy into hospital an' him foightin' dhrunk! Faith, he must be another Oirish gintleman himself, indade."
"He's a Scotchman and was middle-weight champion of India last year," rejoined Dam, and moistened his block of pipe-clay again in the most obvious, if least genteel, way.
"Annyhow he's a mere Hussar and must be rimonsthrated wid for darin' to assault and batther a Dhraghoon—an' him dhrunk, poor bhoy. Say the wurrud, Matty. We'll lay for the spalpeen, the whole of E Troop, at the Ring o' Bells, an' whin he shwaggers in like he was a Dhraghoon an' a sodger, ye'll up an' say 'Threes about' an' act accordin' subsequint, an' learn the baste not to desthroy an' insult his betthers of the Ould Second. Thread on the tail of his coat, Matty…."
"If I had anything to do with it at all I'd tread on Flannigan's coat, and you can tell him so, for disgracing the Corps…. Take off your jacket and help with my boots, Shocky. I'm for Guard."
"Oi'd clane the boots of no man that ud demane himself to ax it," was the haughty reply of the disappointed warrior. "Not for less than a quart at laste," he amended.
"A quart it is," answered Dam, and O'Shaughnessy speedily divested himself of his stable-jacket, incidentally revealing the fact that he had pawned his shirt.
"You have got your teeth ready, then?" observed Dam, noting the underlying bareness—and thereby alluded to O'Shaughnessy's habit of pawning his false teeth after medical inspection and redeeming them in time for the next, at the cost of his underclothing—itself redeemed in turn by means of the teeth. Having been compelled to provide himself with a "plate" he invariably removed the detested contrivance and placed it beside him when sitting down to meals (on those rare occasions when he and not his "uncle" was the arbiter of its destinies)….
A young and important Lance-Corporal, a shocking tyrant and bully, strode into the room, his sword clanking. O'Shaughnessy arose and respectfully drew him aside, offering him a "gasper". They were joined by a lean hawk-faced individual answering to the name of Fish, who said he had been in the American navy until buried alive at sea for smiling within sight of the quarter-deck.
"Yep," he was heard to say to some statement of O'Shaughnessy's. "We'll hatch a five-bunch frame-up to put the eternal kibosh on the tuberous spotty—souled skunklet. Some. We'll make him wise to whether a tippy, chew-the-mop, bandy-legged, moke-monkey can come square-pushing, and with
