Thus adjured, Toni, still rubbing his shins, got up, and going still farther off, made another clumsy rush. This time, by scrambling with both hands and feet, he managed to get on Caporal’s back, and then, working forward, he perched himself almost astride the horse’s neck, and said with a foolish smile:
“I can’t get any farther forward, sir.”
“Get off!” roared the sergeant.
Toni worked backward as he had worked forward, and slid down behind. Old Caporal, at this, made a disdainful motion with his hind leg, and Toni, with a scream, bolted off, yelling: “Take care! take care! he’s beginning to kick.”
The recruits had something else to think of now in their own efforts to vault on Caporal’s back. Some of them were awkward enough, but all did better than Toni. Then came the mounting and dismounting while the horse was galloping round in a circle, the sergeant standing in the middle with a long whip to keep him going.
Toni, meanwhile, had stood with his heart in his mouth, watching Paul Verney. There was not, on Paul’s part, the slightest recognition of his old friend. Toni’s shock of black hair, which was as much a part of him as his black eyes and Jacques in his pocket, had been closely-cropped, and he had grown a black mustache, which quite changed the character of his face, and he looked away from Paul Verney, not wishing for recognition at that time and place.
Toni was also the first man to attempt the mounting and dismounting. He ran around the circle twice before he seemed to screw up enough courage to try to mount, and could not then until the sergeant’s long whip had tickled his legs sharply. In vain he clutched at the horse’s mane, and made ineffectual struggles. Once he fell under Caporal’s feet, and only by the horse’s intelligence escaped being trodden on.
“If the horse were as great a fool as you are,”—roared the sergeant.
Crack went the sergeant’s whip as Toni got on his legs. Timidity and stupidity have to be got out of any man who has to serve in a dragoon regiment, and the sergeant proceeded to take them out of Toni.
“Look here, my man,” he said, “you have got to learn to do that trick now and here—do you understand?”