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His fate might be mine any day, and I had plenty of things to think about. The poor girl would mourn alone. One day I was thus standing near the grave, when I heard a boy's voice say, "Sure that's yourself, Mr Armstrong." I looked up, and before me I saw a young drummer-boy, in the uniform of the 57th regiment. "Yes, my lad; and who are you?" I asked, not recollecting the features.
While the boy pondered and fretted over the matter, the long roll of a drum came around a cliff-corner, and then a file of ragged soldiers, or what seemed to be such, showed in the moonlight, with a diminutive drummer-boy, pounding for dear life, not far in the rear.
There was a little drummer-boy I was fond of who was hit down before my company at Kuhnersdorf; when I ran up to give him some water, he looked exactly like my dear Bryan then did there's no mistaking that awful look of the eyes. We carried him home and scoured the country round for doctors to come and look at his hurt. But what does a doctor avail in a contest with the grim invincible enemy?
Still Belgium recalled the triumphs of Marlborough, and although every mail brought news of the tremendous efforts Napoleon was making to reorganize the fighting power of France, and of the manner in which the veterans of his former wars had responded to the call, there was not a doubt of success in the minds of the Twenty-eighth, from the colonel down to the youngest drummer-boy.
And when Ted comes next to me I says, "Is your button lost, old chap, that you're in such a stew?" And he says, "No, the button is all right, but I'm thinkin' how to enlist." 'He'll go for a drummer-boy as soon as he's big enough, and I'll go with him! cried Carrots. 'Oh, come on, shouted one of the impatient ones; 'if Ted's not here, let us begin without him.
About mid-winter a party of hostile Lipans made a swoop around and skirting the garrison, killing a herder a discharged drummer-boy in sight of the flag-staff. Of course great excitement followed. Captain J. G. Walker, of the Mounted Rifles, immediately started with his company in pursuit of the Indians, and I was directed to accompany the command.
Devlin, the Color Sergeant of E Company, glanced at the empty saddle and tumbled through the barrack-rooms, kicking up each Room Corporal as he passed. "Up, ye beggars! There's something happened to the Colonel's son," he shouted. "He couldn't fall off! S'elp me, 'e couldn't fall off," blubbered a drummer-boy, "Go an' hunt acrost the river.
Upon screaming for help, the sack was opened, and an Arab threatened him with a knife should he make the slightest noise. Thus quieted, he was carried hundreds of miles through Kordofan to Dongola on the Nile, at which place he was sold to slave-dealers and taken to Cairo to be sold to the Egyptian government as a drummer-boy.
'But, said Kim, 'I am not a Sahib, and I say I made a fault to curse thee, Mahbub Ali, on that day at Umballa when I thought I was betrayed by a Pathan. I was senseless; for I was but newly caught, and I wished to kill that low-caste drummer-boy. I say now, Hajji, that it was well done; and I see my road all clear before me to a good service. I will stay in the madrissah till I am ripe.
And up the heights of Alma and Spicheren, and wherever death has his red flag a-flying, and sounds his own potent tuck upon the cannons, there also must the drummer-boy, hurrying with white face over fallen comrades, batter and bemaul this slip of skin from the loins of peaceable donkeys. Generally a man is never more uselessly employed than when he is at this trick of bastinadoing asses' hide.