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Soldiers Three - Part 2 by Rudyard Kipling
page 136 of 246 (55%)
"Get on," said the Major. "We shall catch it to-night."

The column moved forward very gingerly for a few paces. Then there
was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on
small stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements
that would have waked the dead.

"Now we've gone and done it," said Lieutenant Halley. "All the
hillside awake and all the hillside to climb in the face of
musketry-fire! This comes of trying to do night-hawk work."

The trembling trooper picked himself up and tried to explain that
his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built
of loose stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There
was no need to give reasons. The Major's big Australian charger
blundered next, and the column came to a halt in what seemed to be
a very graveyard of little cairns, all about two feet high. The
manoeuvres of the squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt
like mounted quadrilles without training and without the music;
but at last the horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way,
walked clear of the cairns, till every man of the squadron
reformed and drew rein a few yards up the slope of the hill. Then,
according to Lieutenant Halley, there was another scene very like
the one which has been described. The Major and Carter insisted
that all the men had not joined rank, and that there were more of
them in the rear, clicking and blundering among the dead men's
cairns. Lieutenant Halley told off his own troopers again and
resigned himself to wait. Later on he said to me:

"I didn't much know and I didn't much care what was going on. The
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