Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
For surely he could have found no other vulnerable spot in the great man's composition. The first shock of the trooper's news began to pass. Lablache's mind began to balance itself again. Such a state of nerves as was his could not last and the man remain sane. Possibly the thought that he was still a rich man came to his aid.
Scores of men, women and children lined the rim of the crater, gawking into the smoky pit, while other scores roamed aimlessly around the nearby hill and desert. A young sheriff's deputy standing beside the State trooper's car raised his hand to halt the AEC disaster van. The truck stopped and the white-suited radiation team leaped from the vehicle, counters in hand, racing for the crater.
But this he declined, with becoming gratitude indeed, but none the less firmly. He had no fancy to spend the rest of his life in a trooper's saddle riding down naked savages an agreeable occupation, whose only variation was an afternoon at pig-sticking or a chance crack at some Doomsman's head. Better to endure the drudgery of the tan-pits than to part with all purpose in life.
"Now so surely as I am Kurt, the Knacker, there is more in this priestling than meets the eye," he muttered. "Is a blithe young chap, with such a pair of shoulders, to willingly prefer a black robe to a velvet jacket, a priest's empire over a score of silly women to a seat in a trooper's saddle, and the whole green world from which to pick and choose his pleasures?
It is the business of a non-commissioned man like me to help his officers keep control, and I did what I might. I was nearly killed by a wounded German officer who seized my bridle-rein; but a trooper's lance took him in the throat and I rode on untouched. For all I know that was the only danger I was in that night. A battle is a strange thing, sahib like a dream.
"Mind, corporal, you've promised I should have a shot," he said, and Pike nodded assent, although he could not turn from his loophole. Another minute and the Henry rifle barked its loud challenge down the slope, and the old trooper's keen, set features relaxed in a grin. "Now they've got two to lug," he muttered to Jim. "Lord! See that beggar roll over those rocks!"
How he had pitied some of the other recruits, making their first acquaintance with the Trooper's "long-faced chum" under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! Rough! What a character the fellow was! Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if not a gentleman.
A part of the story had come by way of the doctor in charge of the ambulance train which had brought him from Krugersdorp to Johannesburg, a part of it had come from the trooper's own lips, and that was the most tragic part of it all. Below, in the courtyard of the hospital, Kruger Bobs squatted on his heels in the sun and waited.
His wide felt hat, turned up on one side like a trooper's, was well back on his head; his pinkish brown face was freely taking the sun, and his clear, light-blue eyes gazed ahead unblinking in the strong light.
I can't imagine his agreeing to the use I'm making of you. I've no time to listen to his protests. Write, man, write!" "Give me the paper and the pen, sahib!" Ranjoor Singh wrote by the light of a flickering oil lamp, using his trooper's shoulder for support. He passed the finished note back to the general.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking