“I wouldn’t blame you for fightin’,” said he, “if you only knew how to use your hands; but you don’t. Take these things, and I’ll show you.” The men appreciated his efforts. Now, instead of blaspheming and swearing at a comrade, and threatening to shoot him, they could take him apart, and soothe themselves to exhaustion. As one explained whom Cottar found with a shut eye and a diamond-shaped mouth spitting blood through an embrasure: “We tried it with the gloves, sir, for twenty minutes, and _that_ done us no good, sir. Then we took off the gloves and tried it that way for another twenty minutes, same as you showed us, sir, an’ that done us a world o’ good. ’T wasn’t fightin’, sir; there was a bet on.” Cottar dared not laugh, but he invited his men to other sports, such as racing across country in shirt and trousers after a trail of torn paper, and to single-stick in the evenings, till the native population, who had a lust for sport in every form, wished to know whether the white men understood wrestling. They sent in an ambassador, who took the soldiers by the neck and threw them about the dust; and the entire command were all for this new game. They spent money on learning new falls and holds, which was better than buying other doubtful commodities; and the peasantry grinned five deep round the tournaments. That detachment, who had gone up in bullock-carts, returned to headquarters at an average rate of thirty miles a day, fair heel-and-toe; no sick, no prisoners, and no court martials pending. They scattered themselves among their friends, singing the praises of their lieutenant and looking for causes of offense. “How did you do it, young un?” the adjutant asked. “Oh, I sweated the beef off ’em, and then I sweated some muscle on to ’em. It was rather a lark.” “If that’s your way of lookin’ at it, we can give you all the larks you want. Young Davies isn’t feelin’ quite fit, and he’s next for detachment duty. Care to go for him?” “Sure he wouldn’t mind? I don’t want to shove myself forward, you know.” “You needn’t bother on Davies’s account. We’ll give you the sweepin’s of the corps, and you can see what you can make of ’em.” “All right,” said Cottar. “It’s better fun than loafin’ about cantonments.” “Rummy thing,” said the adjutant, after Cottar had returned to his wilderness with twenty other devils worse than the first. “If Cottar only knew it, half the women in the station would give their eyes—confound ’em!—to have the young un in tow.” “That accounts for Mrs. Elery sayin’ I was workin’ my nice new boy too hard,” said a wing commander. “Oh, yes; and ‘Why doesn’t he come to the bandstand in the evenings?’ and ‘Can’t I get him to make up a four at tennis with the Hammon girls?’” the adjutant snorted. “Look at young Davies makin’ an ass of himself over mutton-dressed-as-lamb old enough to be his mother!”