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It is difficult for me to withstand the temptation to tell what has befallen some of my men since the regiment disbanded; how McGinty, after spending some weeks in Roosevelt Hospital in New York with an attack of fever, determined to call upon his captain, Woodbury Kane, when he got out, and procuring a horse rode until he found Kane's house, when he hitched the horse to a lamp-post and strolled in; how Cherokee Bill married a wife in Hoboken, and as that pleasant city ultimately proved an uncongenial field for his activities, how I had to send both himself and his wife out to the Territory; how Happy Jack, haunted by visions of the social methods obtaining in the best saloons of Arizona, applied for the position of "bouncer out" at the Executive Chamber when I was elected Governor, and how I got him a job at railroading instead, and finally had to ship him back to his own Territory also; how a valued friend from a cow ranch in the remote West accepted a pressing invitation to spend a few days at the home of another ex-trooper, a New Yorker of fastidious instincts, and arrived with an umbrella as his only baggage; how poor Holderman and Pollock both died and were buried with military honors, all of Pollock's tribesmen coming to the burial; how Tom Isbell joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and how, on the other hand, George Rowland scornfully refused to remain in the East at all, writing to a gallant young New Yorker who had been his bunkie: "Well, old boy, I am glad I didn't go home with you for them people to look at, because I ain't a Buffalo or a rhinoceros or a giraffe, and I don't like to be stared at, and you know we didn't do no hard fighting down there.
There was a short scuffle in the darkness, and presently Paddy appeared above the heads of the others in the mêlée. "There, now," said he to them, "that was well done. One would easily be telling that I was an ex-trooper of the king." He rode out to us complacently. "'Tis a good horse, if only he steered with a tiller instead of these straps," he remarked, "and he goes well before the wind."
Mitchell had been carried in, "what think ye noo, lad, o' us Covenanters an' oor lack o' lang-sufferin' an' oor defyin' the laws? Aren't these laws we ought to defy, but havena properly defied yet, laws illegally made by a perjured King and an upstart Cooncil?" "Mr. Black," said the ex-trooper, seizing his companion's hand with an iron grip, "from this day forward I am with you heart and soul."
But the ex-trooper, now Commandant, knew that a day of reckoning was coming, and kept a sharp lookout. When the hostile ship Spes was reported steering in from the sea, the flag of Sweden flew from the peak of Hammershus, and nothing on land betrayed that there had been a change.
He lived thirty-three years after that, the patriarch of his people, and raised a large family of children. Not a few of his descendants are to-day living in the United States. In the home of one of them in Brooklyn, New York, is treasured a silver drinking cup which King Frederik gave to the ex-trooper; but it is not the one he sent back with his deputation.
Not only did these keen observers know every officer by sight, and have for him some distinguishing name of their own, but many a trooper, easily singled out from his fellows because of his stature, or the color of his hair, or some other physical peculiarity, was as well known as his captain or lieutenant, and Bruce, ex-trooper of the Scots Greys, and now a model sergeant of Yankee cavalry, was already a marked man in the eyes of the southern Sioux.
Although not much in the habit of engaging in prayer save at the formal periods of morning and evening our ex-trooper was just then in the mood to take his friend's advice. He retired to the place of refuge under Black's house, where he found several people who had evidently been at the communion on Skeoch Hill.
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