Trooper Tales — page 235: what you’re looking at

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

EE s— The Story of a Cavalry Horse. 219 Sheridan trembled for hours after it, even while the tall trooper caressed him. “Why, Sherry, your gait is a lullaby,” the big cavalry- man would say. “You dash like a shooting star. You're a born soldier, bright eyes, and the best horse in the troop. . . . No,I haven’t any sugar stowed away in that shirt pocket, so you needn’t nose for it. Maybe I didn’t know a good thing when I picked you out. What have I ever done that you should knock my hat off with your nose. Ah, you’re a playful little darkey-joker!’ At the watering-trough Sheridan touched noses with Poncho and made friends. Another day he walked close to the heels of Rio Grande, a long, black-hodied charger, and the latter did not even lower his ears. Again he was tethered next to Cherokee on the picket line, and the two became chummy. The black gelding was a troop-horse now; “one of the fanciest,”” who knew no life nor desired to know no other than that of the cavalry. The whinny which floated over the meadows that summer morning long ago was only a misty memory. And all the while there grew in the mind of the beautiful black a deeper, truer affection for the tall trooper who groomed and petted him. But men come and go in every cavalry outfit—the horses seldom change. Old soldiers finish their terms of enlistment, recruits come in. Sheridan, every inch for the cavalry, lost his old master whom he loved. He was sought after by each man in the troop—and he tried bravely and sorrowfully to become attached to his new Eomichooks-com