Trooper Tales — page 135: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SHADOW AND THE CHERUB. The first time I saw Shadow was the night the Fifth pulled out for Porto Rico. Shadow was a dusky kid of quality, and he now wears a cavalryman’s blouse and a shirt of army blue. How this came about involves the prejudices of a nation. Shadow was not old enough to be subservient. The knowledge that he was black had never hurt him yet. But his father was a son of slavery, and his father’s father, so in Shadow’s nature there was mildness and long-suffering, and in his back a bow to people with. white faces. It was a bow, not a cringe—a pleasant sensa- tion of obeying, not fawning humility. But cavalrymen from the land where cotton blooms, and persimmon trees flourish in every strip of woodland, make no distinction. And many are the cavalrymen in Uncle Sam’s service who hail from localities where negroes are hired now, and hated. But there are others who punched cattle and straddled cow-ponies west of the Mississippi and not so far south as the Rio Grande; and others still who lived once where negroes are seldom COMIC NOOLKS,(EO)