Hoof Beats 



morning down to the cable office and wander 

 about, unhitched, for an hour or more, while 

 Livingston, inside, pleaded and threatened to get 

 his message sent. He could stand it now all right, 

 the amused snickers and whispered remarks of the 

 other horses, for didn't he have a champion now, 

 that tall, weatherbeaten man standing just inside 

 the door with his hands on his hips, legs spread 

 firmly apart, and now and then patting the big 

 **44" in the worn leather holster at his side, as he 

 said to the cable operator in a deliciously lazy 

 drawl : — 



"Well, so help me, if that cable isn't sent before 

 I come back I'll make this office look like the 

 Fourth of July." 



Then, one day, horses and guns and men formed 

 into organized fighting bodies, and little by little 

 the town w as emptied as the army marched into 

 the sun parched veldt. Brutus, keen and alert, 

 with the gaunt man in the white pith helmet, 

 became a familiar sight, as he trotted or cantered 

 untiringly beside the big troop horses of the 

 advance guard of cavalry. At night, when the 

 column halted, he w^as hobbled in the horse lines, 

 but much to his disgust, with Troop A of the 19th 

 Lancers, that had spurned him and cast him out. 

 The war had become a grim reality, and the early 

 morning treks into the withering veldt, enlivened 

 136 



