"Welcome back, Norcliff, old fellow!" said Travers, shaking me warmly by the hand; "we must look up a kit for you somehow, and a remount too. Beverley has a second horse; but I think its tail was eaten off by Scarlett's bay mare when the corn fell short."
"Our horses have no nosebags. Those infernal red-tape-worms in London are doing their best to destroy us," said Sir Harry Scarlett.
"Are Sir Nigel's suspicions to be right, after all?" thought I.
"You forget my Arab horse—my spoil from the enemy."
"Well, gentlemen," said Studhome, who had been uncorking several bottles, "you shall sup à la carte. I have a hare which is being jugged in that identical warming-pan which we picked up at Eskel; two golden plovers and a gallant bustard are being stewed with it. I shot the latter; the hare was caught by Travers' Kurdistan dog—a rough brute, like your Scotch staghounds, M'Goldrick. That is my kitchen," he added, pointing to a hole before the tent, in which some ashes were smouldering. "This is true Crimean fashion. Make a hole as a grate, and when you have aught to put in your kettle light a fire under it. 'Dost like the picture?' But here come the viands!"
The stew, which had been prepared by Pitblado and Studhome's servant (both of whom officiated in their stablejackets), was certainly savoury enough in odour, though not quite such as we might have welcomed at the home mess-table. It steamed and spattered bravely in two large tin dishes; and with their contents, and some biscuits of Trieste flour from the bakery-ship Abundance (on board which twenty thousand pounds of bread were made daily, and yet the army starved), a piece of cheese, some fruit, and several bottles of Bass, sherry, and brandy, we resolved to make a night of it.
"'Od, it's a queer mess, this!" said that constitutional grumbler, M'Goldrick, as he fished away with his fork. "I doubt whether the mastodon or the megatherium of antediluvian times would have faced it. What do you call this, Studhome?"
"Come, don't mock the blessings of war, most learned Scot! That is the gizzard of a wild bustard. Help yourself and pass the sherry. Pitblado, uncork the Bass."
"Wood is frightfully scarce here," said Travers. "Our fellows seized and burnt all the tent-poles and pegs of Hadji Mehmet's regiment of Bono Johnnies, and old Raglan made a devil of a row about it."
"We are put to odd shifts, certainly," added the colonel, laughing; "and it is seldom a supper like this comes our way, Norcliff. The green coffee, pounded between two stones, is not the worst thing we have to encounter; for, after it is pounded, we have no fuel wherewith to boil it, and men are actually flogged for taking dry-wood from the beach. We must do our best to keep ourselves alive, though the Russians and red-tapists are doing theirs to make an end of us."