Cavalry transports were coming in every day now; the Varna beach looked like a country horse-fair, and to Jim was given the task of superintending the debarkation of the horses and their dispatch to their appointed places. One day, when the great raft on which the horses were floated to the shore bumped up against the little pier, a nervous brown mare broke loose and jumped overboard. There happened to be no small boats close at hand, and the poor beast, white-eyed with terror at the shouts of the onlookers, struck out valiantly for the open sea. To Jim, in the thinnest and oldest garments he possessed, and sweating heartily from his labours, an extra bath was but an additional enjoyment. He leaped aboard, ran nimbly along outside the horses, and launched himself after the snorting evader. His long swift side-stroke soon carried him alongside. He soothed her with comforting words, turned her head shorewards, and presently rode her up the beach amid the bravos of the onlookers. It was little things like that that won the hearts of his men. They knew he would do as much and more for any one of them. As he slipped off, with a final pat to the trembling beast, a hearty hand clapped his wet shoulder. "Well done, old Jim! It was Carne taught you that, old man." And the voice of the gigantic dragoon, whose clap was still tingling in his shoulder, was the voice of George Herapath, though Jim had to look twice at his face to make sure of him. "Why, you hairy man, I'd never have known you. Just got here?" "This minute, my boy, and glad to see you old stagers still alive and kicking. Here's Harben. I say, Ralph, this dirty wet boy is our old Jim." "Hanged if I'd have jumped into the sea after an old troop-horse," said Harben, looking somewhat distastefully at the dishevelled Jim. "A horse is always a horse," said Jim, "and an extra bath's neither here nor there. Can't have too many this weather, if you work as I've been doing lately." "Deucedly dirty work, it seems to me. Why don't you let your men do it? That's what they're here for." "They are doing it," said Jim, waving a benedictory wet hand towards the horse-fair along the beach. "I'm only keeping an eye on them." And before they could say more, a very splendidly accoutred horseman rode down to them, with a still more gorgeous one behind him. "Very smartly done, my boy," said the first in English, though he wore the uniform of a colonel of Cuirassiers. "An officer that looks after his horses will certainly look after his men." "Hello, sir!" jerked Jim. "Glad to see you again! Sorry I'm so dirty." "It's the men who get dirty who do the work." And then he turned to the magnificent personage behind, who sat looking on with a suave smile on his clean-shaven face, and said in French, "This is one of my cubs, Your Highness, though I'll be crucified if I know which." And turning to Jim--"me see, now you're----" "I'm Jim, sir. Jack's in the Engineers."