Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy by Rudyard Kipling Page B

after Tick had been handed over to him to make into a decent ‘Hornet.’ That’s what the bye-name of our regiment is. Harkness told me when I came into Riding School, and laughed at Tick clinging on to the neck of his old crock as if he had never seen a horse before. Harkness was cursing like – a riding-master. He said: – ‘You mark my words, Mr Mactavish, he’s been kidding me, and he’d kid you. He can ride. Wish some of you other gentleman could ride as well. He is playing the dark horse – that’s what he’s doing, and be d – – d to him!’ Well, Tick was as innocent as a baby when he rolled off on to the tan. I noticed that he fell somehow as if he knew the hang of the trick; and Harkness passed him out of Riding School on the strength of that fall. He sat square enough on parade, and pretended to be awfully astonished. Well, we didn’t think anything of that till he came out one night in the billiard line at Black Pool, and scooped the whole Mess. Then we began to mistrust him, but he swore it was all by a fluke. We used to chaff him fearfully; and draw him about four nights out of the seven. Once we drugged his chargers with opium overnight; and Tick found ’em asleep and snoring when he wanted to go on parade.
    He was a trifle wrathy over this; and the Colonel didn’t soothe him by giving him the rough edge of his tongue for allowing his horses to go to sleep at unauthorised hours. We didn’t mean to do more than make the chargers a bit bobbery next morning; but something must have gone wrong with the opium. To give the Beast his due, he took everything very well indeed; and never minded how often we pulled his leg and made things lively for him. We never liked him, though. Can’t like a man who always does everything with a little bit up his sleeve. It’s not fair.
    Well, one day in July Tick took three months’ leave and cleared out somewhere or other – to Cashmere I think. He didn’t tell us where, and we weren’t very keen on knowing.
    We missed him at first, for there was no one to draw. Our regiment don’t take kindly to that sort of thing. We are mostof ushardas nails;and we respect eachother’slittle weaknesses.
    About October, Tick turned up with a lot of heads and horns and skins – for it seemed that the beggar could shoot as well as he did most things – and the Mess began to sit up at the prospect of having some more fun out of him. But Tick was an altered man. Never saw anyone so changed. Hadn’t an ounce of bukh or bounce left about him; never betted; knocked off what little liquor he used to take; got rid of his ponies, and went mooning about like an old ghost. Stranger still, he seemed to lay himself out in a quiet sort of way to be a popular man; and, in about three weeks’ time we began to think we had misjudged him, and that he wasn’t half such a bad fellow after all. The Colonel began the movement in his favour. Said that Tick was awfully cut up about something or other, and that we really ought to make his life more pleasant for him. He didn’t say all that much at once. Don’t believe he could if he tried for a week, but he made us understand it. And in a quiet sort of way – Tick was very quiet in everything he did just then – he tumbled to the new bandobust more than ever, and we nearly all took to him. I say nearly all, because I was an exception. He had a little bit up his sleeve in this matter, too.
    You see he had given all his skins and his heads to the Mess, and they were hung in trophies all round the wall. I was seeing them put up, and I saw in one corner the Cabul Customs mark, in a sort of aniline ink stamp, that all the skins that come from Peshawar must have. Now I knew Cashmere wasn’t Peshawar, and that bears didn’t grow with Customs marks inside the hide. But I sat tight and said nothing. I want you to remember that I suspected Tick Boileau from the first. The fellows in the Mess say I was just as much taken in as the rest of ’em;