here every horse rears his tail as
a peacock spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot.
The bobtailed Arab's nose was up, his stump was high. A hundred times he
had been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker's apron.
He snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels
of the colonel's troop.

Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.

That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, "Allala-Akbar!"
rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti's strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like
an iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti's. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo. The bobtailed Arab's lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin. Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.

Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse,
he was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound
and broke into the desert. But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse
lanced under him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with
Fielding in front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the
little band retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead
on the field, and six times that number of Dervishes.

It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding's supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.

But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.

Fielding said that Seti's was the good old game for which V.C.'s were
the reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the
enemy; but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of
a horse. To this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not
understand why Seti should have stayed behind and