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He pointed off across a flat beside the road toward a sign that loomed in the center. The black-browed giant designated as Tiny swung the mules off the road and headed for the sign. The three wagons were drawn up some fifteen yards apart in the shape of a triangle, the mules unhitched and given a feed of grain from nose-bags, tied to the wagons and supplied with baled hay.
Grace Carter, her attention apparently riveted upon some intricate adjustment of her camera, scarcely breathed; Constance Brevoort, flicking the ash from her cigarette, never moved an eyelash. In the silence which followed the question, the champing of the horses on the grain in their nose-bags sounded to the women like a threshing machine. "I am much flattered!" said Douglass, slowly.
A few belated women still lingered in the Strand, and the city stood up like a prison, hard and stark in the cold, penetrating light of morning. She sat upon a pillar's base, her eyes turned towards the cabmen's shelter. The horses munched in their nose-bags, and the pigeons came down from their roosts.
Well, if anybody had told me that a bustle could be made to hold stuff enough to fill a bushel-basket, I would not have believed it. We filled three nose-bags, such as cavalrymen feed horses in, with paper packages and bottles of quinine. There were thirty bottles of pills, and salves and ointments, and plasters. "This is panning out first rate," I said, with less emotion.
At last he came to the narrow lane behind the huge pile, feeling that he had at last reached the end of his five hours' tramp. There stood the carriage, all dusty with the night's driving, looking dilapidated and forlorn; the tired horses drooped their heads in the flaccid and empty canvas nose-bags. The extinguished lamps were black with the smoke from the last flare of their sputtering wicks.
Our nose-bags were nice and heavy, and we still had about a pound of nail-rod between us. The moon reminded my mate, Jack Mitchell, of something anything reminded him of something, in fact. "Did you ever notice," said Jack, in a lazy tone, just as if he didn't want to tell a yarn "Did you ever notice that people always shoot the moon when there's no moon? Have you got the matches?"
Then there's pasture ropes, an' nose-bags, an' a harness punch, an' all such things. An' Hazel an' Hattie eatin' their heads off all the time we're waitin'. An' I 'm just itchin' to be started myself." He stopped abruptly and confusedly. "Now, Billy, what have you got up your sleeve? I can see it in your eyes," Saxon demanded and indicted in mixed metaphors. "Well, Saxon, you see, it's like this.
"First of all, let's put on the nose-bags, and let the horses have a meal," Chris said; "then set to work to groom them. Remember, there must not be a speck of yesterday's dust left anywhere." All were soon hard at work.
Three times a day the black billies and cloudy nose-bags are placed on the table. The men eat in a casual kind of way, as though it were only a custom of theirs, a matter of form a habit which could be left off if it were worth while. The Exception is heard to remark to no one in particular that he'll give all he has for a square meal. "An' ye'd get it cheap, begod!" says a big Irish shearer.
To resume, then: From 6.30 we have half an hour to pack kits, that is to say, to roll the cloak and strap it on the riding saddle, pack the off saddle with spare boots and rolls made up of a waterproof sheet, blanket, harness-sheets, spare breeches, muzzles, hay-nets, etc., and finally to buckle on filled nose-bags and our mess-tins, and strap horse-blankets under the saddles.
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