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Updated: May 17, 2025
"From end to end of India," the boy went on, "down Bombay side and up Calcutta side, regiments of elephants go with regiments of men in the never-ending fatigue marching that keeps them all fit. "The tenting and commissariat-stuff is carried by the elephants, straight from camp to camp, safe and sure and in proper time always.
Now once more six companies were gathered at the post of the standard, two were tenting on the prairie just outside the garrison, the other four were regularly in barracks, and the concentration there boded a move or "business" of some kind. "Old Catnip," the colonel, was East, but the lieutenant-colonel was commanding, and the junior major was there.
And their song, pulsing out across the undulating valley wrapped in the twilight peace, made a harmony so wonderfully tender that we who had dared danger for days unflinchingly now turned our faces to the shadows to hide our tears. We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground. Give us a song to cheer Our weary hearts, a song of home And friends we love so dear.
Billy Camp began to worry about shooting the wanigan through the sluice-way. The rear had been tenting at the dam for two days, and was about ready to break camp, when Jimmy Powers swung across the trail to tell them of the big jam. Ten miles along the river bed, the stream dropped over a little half-falls into a narrow, rocky gorge. It was always an anxious spot for the river drivers.
He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak.
But my friend Walter Allen, who asked me to stop here, lives in a house, not very big, which has been built here lately, because these meadows are so much liked, especially in summer, that there was getting to be rather too much of tenting on the open field; so the parishes here about, who rather objected to that, built three houses between this and Caversham, and quite a large one at Basildon, a little higher up.
On the very day the company suspended operations all the vacant ground on and about the saddle was pegged out. Most of those who "rushed" the vicinity were New Zealanders from Hokitika. The site on which my tent stood was appropriated by a man named Cunningham. When ground was required for mining purposes, any one tenting on it had to remove.
A velveteen coat had been thrown aside to lighten weight; from the dust markings one horse seemed to have fallen; and the load had been lightened still more by casting off half sacks of flour and some canvas tenting; but the tracks of the lame horse picking the soft places along the trail showed drops of blood. Had it cut itself on the glassy lava rocks; or was it the hoof?
She came down the trail, hand in hand with the red-haired, freckled timber guard whom she had worn herself past the limit of endurance to save only a few weeks before, racing in her eagerness to reach them, and laughing her "Good morning, gentlemen," right and left. When she was ensconced on the wagonload of tenting, she sat on a roll of canvas as a queen on her throne.
So we were once more "tenting on the old camp ground," after an absence of nearly three years. But the place did not look as it did before. It seemed old and dilapidated and there were only a few troops there. As compared with the active, stirring conditions that obtained there in February and March, 1862, it now looked indescribably dejected and forlorn. But our stay here this time was short.
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