Trooper Tales — page 139: what you’re looking at

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

Shadow and the Cherub. 127 That’s all you people are good for anyway. Grab a root, and grab it quick,” This was only part of what the sergeant from the South said the first morning out. The whole was more brutal. The sergeant was sick from the sea and sick from the night before on land. We, from the North, saw Shadow’s trouble and tried to put him right. But something went wrong in the dusky boy’s mind that morning which we could not put right. You have all read of transport horrors. Perhaps you have heard, too, of the sufferings of the splendid troop horses and about the troopers themselves on a voyage. Where the air is scented with sage brush and the eyes smart with alkali; from the blizzards of Dakota and the sun-baked plains of Texas—the cavalrymen come. They are landsmen. They march through dust-clouds and race through rainstorm, but they droop when on board a rolling ship. Their bowed legs fit equally well to the back of a mustang or a Wales, but they will not adjust them- selves to a swaying hurricane deck. Twenty feet below the surface of the sea are the air- tight and cold storage compartments. Other compart- ments, where hundreds of hammocks are swung in tiers, are above this. When the hatches are closed this second deck is also air-tight. Here 600 cavalrymen sleep. A sheet-iron flooring above them forms the bottom of the stables, and the steel-shod hoofs of the troop horses make a din for the ears of those below like that of many boiler Eomichbooks.co