Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
"Trooper Matthewson, get ready," called the Corporal, and Dam stepped into the ring, saluted, and faced the Sergeant. A brief direction and caution, the usual preliminary, and the word "On guard Play" and Dam was parrying a series of the quickest cuts he had ever met. The Sergeant's sword flickered like the tongue of a Snake.
Not a man believed him capable of the feat. Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the task appeared. Matthewson waxed jubilant. "Three to one!" he proclaimed. "I'll lay you another thousand at that figure, Thornton.
Stand off butcher and baker and all the rest. Savvee? You're drawing down something like six hundred and sixty dollars a month. I want that cash. From now on, stand everybody off and draw down a hundred. I'll pay you interest on the rest till this blows over." Two weeks later, with the pay-roll before them, it was: "Matthewson, who's this bookkeeper, Rogers? Your nephew? I thought so.
His reference to Dam as the only likely champion of the Heavy Cavalry against the Hussar was a tribute to the tremendous thrashing he had received from "Trooper D. Matthewson" when the same had become necessary after a long course of unresented petty annoyance.
And the fools of the Queen's Greys knew it, and hoped to God that Matthewson would "keep off it" till after the Divisional Boxing Tournament and Assault-at-Arms, for, if he did, the Queen's Greys would certainly have the Best Man-at-Arms in the Division and have a mighty good shot at having the Heavy-Weight All-India Champion, since Matthewson had challenged the Holder and held an absolutely unbroken record of victories in the various regimental and inter-regimental boxing tournaments in which he had taken part since joining the regiment.
He turned to work as, but for the memory of Lucille, he would have turned to drink: he laboured to earn deep dreamless sleep and he dreaded sleep. Awake, he could drug himself with work; asleep, he was the prey the bound, gagged helpless, abject prey of the Snake. The greediest glutton for work in the best working regiment in the world was Trooper Matthewson but for him was no promotion.
Would poor Priddell mind if he did not knock again? If it were the Snake it could do Priddell no harm now he being happily dead whereas, if disturbed, it might emerge to the utter undoing mind, body, and soul of Trooper Matthewson. It would certainly send him to Jail or Lunatic Asylum probably to both in due succession, for he was daily getting worse in the matter of the Snake.
"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness; "so don't let that hinder you." Thornton did not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it going again.
The first officer to whom Trooper Matthewson gave his smart respectful salute as he stood on sentry-duty was the Major, the Second-in-Command of the Queen's Greys, newly rejoined from furlough, a belted Earl, famous for his sporting habit of riding always and everywhere without a saddle who, as a merry subaltern, had been Lieutenant Lord Ochterlonie and Adjutant of the Queen's Greys at Bimariabad in India.
And he had been "up against some useful lads" as Captain Chevalier, the president and Maecenas of the Queen's Greys' boxing-club, expressed it. Yes, Matthewson had his points and the man who brought the Regiment the kudos of having best Man-at-Arms and Heavy-Weight Champion of India would be forgiven a lot.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking