Jim reaped--and duly passed along to Jack--the benefit of Lord Deseret's long and wide experience of life under many conditions. As a young man he had served with Wellington in the Peninsula, and he had also been with him at Waterloo, where he had, as fellow aide-de-camp, Fitzroy Somerset, now Lord Raglan, who was to command the present expedition to the East.
So Jim and my lord between them evolved, by process of continuous elimination, a campaigning kit, which, if to Jim's inexperienced eyes it lacked much, comprehended, according to his lordship, everything that was absolutely necessary, and probably even yet some things which he would hasten to throw away under pressure of circumstance.
"How long it will last it is hard to say," said Lord Deseret. "If you should by any chance be kept there till the winter I will send you out all you will need."
"Oh, surely we and the Frenchmen between us can clean it all up before then," said innocent Jim.
"We shall know better when we learn where you're bound for, and what you've got to do. At present no one seems to know. They are all very mysterious about it, which is all right if it's policy, but if it's ignorance----"
Jack was first to go, and Jim was mightily put out that engineers should get ahead of cavalry. They had hoped to be able to run down to Carne to say good-bye, but that was quite out of the question. The army had been rusting, more or less, for forty years, and, now that the call had come, every man on the roll was hard at work scraping the accumulated deposit off his bit of the machine, and oiling the parts. The days were all too short for what had to be done, and leave was out of the question.
Jim was here, there, and everywhere, helping to buy horses for the coming wastage, for if he had no head for business he certainly knew horses from tail to muzzle, from hoof to shoulder, and all in between. He was kept hard at work till the call came for the cavalry, and then every minute of every day was over-full, and his head spun with the calls upon his forethought and ingenuity.
He made long lists of the things he had to see to, on scraps of paper with a pencil that was always blunt and often missing, and as each item was attended to he duly scored it off, and so kept fairly straight.
His men had taken to him, and consulted him now as an oracle, and within his capacity he enjoyed it all immensely.
Lord Deseret's munificence knew no bounds. In addition to a great brown charger, whose peculiar delights were military music and the roar of artillery--the first of which enjoyments the campaign was unfortunately to offer him few opportunities of indulging in, though he had his fill of the other--his lordship presented Jim with a pair of unusually fine silver mounted revolvers, of a calibre calculated to make short work of the biggest Russian born, and one of these he was to hand over to Jack as soon as they met out East. And for Jim himself, as a very special mark of his goodwill, he bought a sword, selected out of many and suiting his grip and reach as if it had been made for him.