Trooper Tales — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

. de 2 ae } we we Se oth RL ages * : 14 The Recruit in the Black Cavalry. The wounded coming back were received differently. The Tampan troopers were browner and thinner and uglier than before, but they cheered and petted the heroes until the train pulled out for the Northern hospitals. After that the men who had never left the States became sullen and insubordinate and worked themselves into a state of melancholy inebriation—because they had not been given a chance to prove that they were soldiers all. But this is the story of Sadie, the toughest, blackest and sweetest-voiced recruit who ever came to the Black Horse troop. His beauty was purely physical. He never learned anything about horses in the cavalry service. It was his instinct to master a mount. His limbs had a most beau- tiful cavalry curve, and superb saddle muscles bulged out the thick trousers of army blue. His shoulders and lungs were equaled only in power by his digestion. Sadie never had a serious interval. At least, not while he was a soldier. In fact, there is less seriousness in a black troop of cavalry than in any other place in the world. But you ought to see them on a skirmish line! They fight without nerves, feelings, fears. They know no hunger, thirst or pain. | To hear Sadie sing, “Swing a-low, Sweet Chariot,” on the moon-lit deck of a transport—well, a man would think things which never occurred to him before—espe- cially if he were advancing toward a hostile coast. And then there was a little gunboat shining through the dark off the starboard bow—a pugnacious little fellow that CORMIESOOKX<SACOLN