t Wesselstroom the
week before Majuba. Wonder how the young un will lick his detachment
into shape."

Cottar turned up six weeks later, on foot, with his pupils. He never
told his experiences, but the men spoke enthusiastically, and fragments
of it leaked back to the colonel through sergeants, batmen, and the
like.

There was great jealousy between the first and second detachments, but
the men united in adoring Cottar, and their way of showing it was by
sparing him all the trouble that men know how to make for an unloved
officer. He sought popularity as little as he had sought it at school,
and therefore it came to him. He favoured no one--not even when the
company sloven pulled the company cricket-match out of the fire with an
unexpected forty-three at the last moment. There was very little getting
round him, for he seemed to know by instinct exactly when and where to
head off a malingerer; but he did not forget that the difference
between a dazed and sulky junior of the upper school and a bewildered,
browbeaten lump of a private fresh from the depot was very small indeed.
The sergeants, seeing these things, told him secrets generally hid from
young officers. His words were quoted as barrack authority on bets in
canteen and at tea; and the veriest shrew of the corps, bursting with
charges against other women who had used the cooking-ranges out of turn,
forbore to speak when Cottar, as the regulations ordained, asked of a
morning if there were "any complaints."

"I'm full o' complaints," said Mrs. Corporal Morrison, "an' I'd kill
O'Halloran's fat sow of a wife any day, but ye know how it is. 'E
puts 'is head just inside the door, an' looks down 'is blessed nose so
bashful, an' 'e whispers, 'Any complaints' Ye can't complain after that.
I want to kiss him. Some day I think I will. Heigh-ho! she'll be a lucky
woman that gets Young Innocence. See 'im now, girls. Do ye blame me?"

Cottar was cantering across to polo, and he looked a very satisfactory
figure of a man as he gave easily to the first excited bucks of his
pony, and slipped over a low mud wall to the practice-ground. There were
more than Mrs. Corporal Morrison who felt as she did. But Cottar was
busy for eleven hours of the day. He did not care to have his tennis
spoiled by petticoats in the court; and after one long afternoon at
a garden-party, he explained to his major that this sort of thing was
"futile priffle," and the major laughed. Theirs was not a mar