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Updated: April 30, 2025
While the holiday folk trooped into the long mess-tent, laughing or lamenting over the afternoon's vicissitudes, Lenox sat at his table in shirt and trousers, his pen devouring the loose sheets before him. He bade Zyarulla bring him meat, bread, and a cup of coffee, and deny admittance even to 'Desmond Sahib' himself.
When the third day dawned bleakly, literally blown piecemeal from out darkness as bleak, the Happy Family rose shiveringly and with sombre disapproval of whatever met their blood-shot eyes; dressed hurriedly in the chill of flapping tent and went out to stagger drunkenly over to where Patsy, in the mess-tent, was trying vainly to keep the biscuits from becoming dust-sprinkled, and sundry pans and tins from taking jingling little excursions on their own account.
Colonel Arundel, riding in front of the staff, halted and faced the brigade. The troops presented arms; the band played the national anthem, "God Save the People!" When the music had ceased the eyes of Colonel Arundel were turned to the flag-pole at the mess-tent. His heart leaped within him when he saw the lines shake, and then, true to the moment of time, up went the flag of the King.
'Let us go, said the lama, sinking back afraid, as the fires twinkled and white officers with jingling swords stalked into the Mess-tent. 'Stand back in the shadow. No one can see beyond the light of a fire, said Kim, his eyes still on the flag. He had never before watched the routine of a seasoned regiment pitching camp in thirty minutes. 'Look! look! look! clucked the lama.
"St-t-top him," said the quartermaster, snailing lazily along from the mess-tent, where he had been lunching; "h e d-doesn't know that if h e g-g-goes c-clear over h e'll w ind up the sw ing." With such energy was that strong man cannonading himself through the air that at each extremity of his increasing arc his body, standing in the swing, was almost horizontal.
'I found this boy in the dark outside the Mess-tent. Ordinarily, I should have chastised him and let him go, because I believe him to be a thief. But it seems he talks English, and he attaches some sort of value to a charm round his neck. I thought perhaps you might help me.
The Happy Family went to bed that night as complacently uncomfortable as children after a Christmas dinner. Not often does it fall to the lot of a cowboy to have served to him stuffed olives and lobster salad with mayonnaise dressing, French fried potatoes and cream puffs from the mess-tent of a roundup outfit. During the next week it fell to the lot of the Happy Family, however.
Happy Jack, with the cook's apron tied tightly around his lank middle, stood despondently in the doorway of the mess-tent and said no word as they approached. In his silence in his very presence there Weary read disaster. "I guess we're too late," he told Dock, in hushed tones; for the minute he hated the white-bearded old man whose drunkenness had cost the Flying-U so dear.
But Edison was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
The day had been sultry; the sun was a "rain sun," while the clouds massed thick to the south-west; and at night the lamps of heaven shone with a reddish, lurid light. The tent-pegs were weighted with camel-boxes against the storm; nevertheless, our mess-tent was levelled in a moment by the howling north-easter warm withal which, setting in about midnight, made all things uncomfortable enough.
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