There were several detached officers also waiting here, and the units forming the reinforcements were coming in daily. We turned half the refreshment room into a sort of station mess, having our meals at one long table. I suppose a contemplative person would have noted those accidental details which differentiated us from the ordinary travellers by the Darjiling-Calcutta mails, who had their meals at the other long table. There we were, the brutal and licentious soldiery feasting and drinking and gambling with shameless _abandon_, while those worthy men of affairs from Calcutta and their excellent ladies took their meals hastily and in sober earnest alongside of us. Some of us must have presented a queer spectacle. I remember in particular one youthful officer, whom I afterwards lost sight of, but who was the most ardent young Napoleon I have met for a long time. He had apparently started growing his beard the day he left his cantonment. He was of the Esau type, and the growth was brisk. The colour was ginger, not the chastened sort that is sprinkled over with sugar, but the crude dark ginger you get in jars. He affected short khaki shorts, as suitable for the soldier in hill warfare. He also affected a khaki cardigan jacket. He had left his helmet behind him, and wore only a khaki pugree with a khaki 'kula' in the centre of it. I used to see ladies, who came in for a quiet cup of tea, glancing sidelong at him. Some were doubtless impressed, and went away enthusiastic about that young warrior. But in the eyes of others I fancy I saw a twinkle. At last my pony with his syce and the missing kit arrived, and I was enabled to start for Gnatong the next day. CHAPTER IV TO GNATONG I marched to Gnatong as a passenger--that is to say, though I accompanied troops, I yet did no duty with them. The camping grounds _en route_ were small clearings in the jungle, so small that not more than two or three hundred men and two or three hundred animals could be encamped at any one spot on a given day. Hence the reinforcements were marching up in very small columns. It was one of these which I accompanied as far as Gnatong. About two or three days' marching takes you out of India into Sikkim, but you are in the heart of the jungle almost as soon as you leave Siliguri. For about seven days you hardly rise at all, merely following the course upstream of the Teesta river, and later on of one of its tributaries.