In July came the inevitable consequences of ill-feeding, ill-temper, enforced idleness, and mismanagement--the men became as sick in body as they had long been at heart. The heats and rains of August turned the camps into steaming stew-pans, and the men, who would have faced death by shot and steel with cheers, died miserably of cholera and typhus, and dying, struck a chill to the hearts of those who were left.
The officers did their best--got up games for them and races. But the more intimate companionship between officers and men which obtained in the French army was lacking in the British, and could not be called into spasmodic existence on the spur of the moment.
The races alone excited a certain amount of enthusiasm, and whenever Jim happened to be in camp he carried all before him.
With quite mistaken grandmotherly solicitude, too, the bands were all silenced, lest their lively music should jar on the ears of the SICK and dying. The men tried sing-songs of their own, but sorely missed their music, and those near any of the French camps would walk any distance to share with them the cheery strains they could not get at home.
The camps were moved from place to place in vain attempt at dodging death. But death went with them and the men died in hundreds. And those who were sent to the hospitals at Varna wished they had died before they got there.
Through all that dreadful time, when the doctors were next to powerless and burying-parties the order of the day, our two boys kept wonderfully well. And for that they were not a little indebted to Lord Deseret, to a certain amount of fatherly oversight on the part of Colonel Carron, and perhaps most of all to the fact that they were kept busy.
Jack and his fellows beat the country-sides for game until they had swept them bare.
Jim, still in luck, was sent out to buy horses, and travelled far and wide, and still farther and wider as the nearer provinces became depleted. And when Jack's game was finished he got permission to go with him, and in those long, venturesome rides they two renewed their youth together, and rejoiced in one another, and found life good.
Many a lively adventure they had as they scoured the long Bulgarian plains in search of their four-legged prizes, for which they paid a trifle over a pound a leg in cash, whereby they beat their French opponents, who only paid in paper which had to be cashed at French Head-quarters, one hundred or more miles away.
To the boys it was all a delightful game; and getting the horses home, when they had found and bought them, was by no means the least exciting part of it. But the chief thing was that it took them out of the deadly camps, kept them fully occupied, and in soundest health when so many sickened and died.