Not a man or boy had moved while the sergeant had been speaking; but he glared round as though every one had been on the shuffle.
‘Sound the scale up and down!’ he cried; and this was done.
‘You, Blair, fall back two paces,’ said the sergeant, ‘and keep your ears open. Try and get the calls fixed in your memory.’
The trumpeters then went through the different camp-calls on the trumpet, and very pretty they sounded. Many of the short calls Jack, who had a very quick, musical ear, was able to remember; but the long ones, like ‘Reveille,’ were too complicated.
‘Stables,’ a very pretty call, Dawes (who had only joined a few months) had great difficulty in sounding. He kept getting horribly flat on one note, and ‘Hooky-beak,’ as the boys called Linham, grew crimson with rage.
‘You’ve no more ear for music than a pariah dog, Dawes!’ he cried. ‘Now, sound it again.’
Trumpeter Dawes did so, but again was flat on the high note.
‘Squeeze it—squeeze it, you one-lunged bandicoot,’ cried the sergeant; and Dawes endeavoured to do so, but made a worse hash of it than before.
‘Brittain, get out the cards,’ cried Linham; and from a cupboard Brittain got out some great cards about two feet wide and of different lengths, on which the various calls were printed in huge notes.
‘Hang up the “Stable” call,’ cried Linham.