Routledge Rides Alone

The dusk was stretching out over the windy hills. There had been a skirmish that day in upper India. Two British columns which had campaigned for months apart telescoped with frightful sounds of gladness. Her Majesty’s foot-soldiers, already tightly knotted about their supper-fires, hooted the cavalrymen who were still struggling with halter-shanks, picket-lines, and mounts that pounded the turf and nickered sky-high for the feed-wagons to come in. Every puff of wind bore a new smell—coffee, camels, leather, gun-reek, cigarettes, saddle-blankets, and nameless others. To-morrow there would be a mile square of hill-pasture so tainted by man and beast that a native-bullock would starve before cropping there until the season of torrents soaked it sweet again.

The civilian correspondents grouped together for mess. There was Bingley of the Thames, respected but not loved, and rather better known as the “Horse-killer”—a young man of Napoleonic ambition and Cowperish gloom. There was Finacune of the Word, who made a florid romance of war-stuff, garnished his battle-fields with palms and ancient temples, and would no more forget his moonlight than the estimate of the number slain. Finacune made a red-blooded wooer out of the British army, and a brown, full-breasted she-devil out of the enemy. His story of the campaign was a courtship of these two, and it read like “A Passion in the Desert,” for which the Word paid him well and loved him mightily. Finacune had another inimitable peculiarity. He possessed one of those slight, natty figures which even civilized clothes cannot spoil; and he could emerge from thirty days in the field, dapper and sartorially fit as from a morning’s fox-hunt.

Then there were Feeney and Trollope and Talliaferro, who carry trays and announce carriages in this narrative, though high priests of the press and Londoners of mark.

The point of the gathering was old Jerry Cardinegh, of the Witness, by profession dean of the cult of the British word-painters of war, but a Tyrone patriot, bone and brain and passion. Just now, old Jerry was taking a dry smoke, two ounces of Scotch, commanding his servants to beat a bull-cheek into tenderloin, and adorning the part of master of ceremonies. Cardinegh wore easily a triple fame: first, and always first, for the quality of his work; second, for having seen more of war (twenty-seven campaigns since he messed with the Chinese Gordon, to this night in Bhurpal) than any other man on the planet; and third for being the father of Noreen Cardinegh, absolutely the loveliest young woman manifesting at the present time in London. The old man’s tenderness of heart for Ireland and for all that Ireland had done and failed, was known in part among the scribes and Pharisees. It had been an endless matter of humor among his compatriots.