"Yes, sir!" the Blackguard ran to the tent.
"Just take my horse to the lines, unsaddle, give him a rub down, then water, and send my servant."
So the Blackguard was busy, and cursing until long after the breakfast bugle; but the Colonel, refreshed by a wash and a hasty change into uniform, made his way to the table set under an awning for the officers' mess.
"Good-morning, gentlemen."
His kindly grey eyes had noted a civilian sitting with his two officers at breakfast, a handsome English youngster, neatly built but small, perhaps twenty years old, to judge by the light down of an incipient moustache; unused to the world, as might be known from the awkward self-consciousness of manners; very green, to judge by the ridiculous bourgeois attempt at a riding costume.
The two Inspectors had risen, big Fraser Gaye, late of Carrington's Horse in South Africa, and little Gunby, from the Kingston Military School.
"Good hunting, sir?" asked the one, but the other was kicking the Englishman furtively to make him stand up. "Good-morning, sir;" he was kicking strenuously, his face reddened with the exertion,—"let me present Mr. Ramsay."
"You're welcome, Mr. Ramsay. Glad to see you;—sit down."
The Colonel had taken a chair at the head of the table, observant of Mr. Ramsay, and smiling with inward laughter. "Why," he wondered, "must a green youngster try to hide his ignorance with a cloak of affectation? He's speechless still with a sort of stage fright, so he pretends a lofty reserved indifference." "No," the Colonel turned suddenly upon Fraser Gaye, talking to give his guest a chance of cooling off, "the hunting was not very good. June is a bad month when one has to respect the game laws. Do you know what game is always in season, Mr. Ramsay?"
The Colonel's winning smile meant, as his subalterns knew, the advent of his very oldest joke. "No?" for Mr. Ramsay was still speechless. "Ah, the kind of sport I speak of is out of date where you come from. Man is the one game animal never out of season in the West."