He saw George rise in his saddle, with his great sabre swinging to the blow. Then a whirling blast of canister shore them all down, and they lay in a heap, men and horses riddled like colanders. And Jim, with a sob, clung to the pommel of his saddle and let the brown horse carry him home. Jack had just got up to camp from night duty in the trenches when the alarm sounded in the valley, and he made his way with the rest to the edge of the plateau to see what was going on. When he saw the cavalry drawn up for action he hurried down the hill as fast as he could go, hung spell-bound halfway at the terrible and amazing sight below, and then tumbled on with a lump in his throat to learn the worst, as the broken riders came reeling back in twos and threes. It was he lifted Jim out of his saddle, and found it all sticky with blood from the lance-thrust in his side. His face was streaming from a graze along the scalp, and he had a bullet through the left shoulder--small things indeed considering where he had been. The miracle of that awful ride was, not that so many fell, but that any single man came back alive. CHAPTER LII PATCHING UP As soon as matters settled down, Colonel Carron rode over at once for news of his boy, He knew he must have been in that brilliant madness, about which every tongue in the camps was wagging, and he feared he had seen the last of him. He had some difficulty in finding what was left of the Light Brigade, for the Russians still held the lowlands in force. They had, in fact, drawn a cordon round the allied forces and were, to an extent, besieging the besiegers, and the cavalry camps had to be moved up on to the plateau. But he came at last on the handful of laxed and weary men, lying about their new quarter's, some fast asleep with their faces in their arms, while willing hands did all their necessary work for them, and every man of them still bore in him the very visible effects of that most dreadful experience. He almost feared to ask for Jim, lest it should kill his last spark of hope. "You had a terrible time," he said, to one on his knees by a big brown horse, which stood there with an occasional shiver as he applied healing ointment to its many wounds. "The whole world will ring with it." "Alt blamed foolishness, sir," growled the man--who had lost his own horse and most of his chums in the foolishness, and so was in a mighty bad humour--and lifted a casual sticky finger in recognition of the Colonel's brilliant uniform. "I'm afraid it was, but you did it nobly. Can you tell me anything of Cornet Carron? Was he in it?"