from another point of view, soldiers in rows and in lines do not compose
well in pictures. I always feel, after seeing infantry drill in an
armory, like Kipling's light-house keeper, who went insane looking at
the cracks between the boards--they were all so horribly alike.

Then Adobe is away out West in the blistering dust, with no towns of any
importance near it. I can understand why men might become listless when
they are at field-work, with the full knowledge that nothing but their
brothers are looking at them save the hawks and coyotes. It is different
from Meyer, with its traps full of Congressmen and girls, both of whom
are much on the minds of cavalrymen.

In due course I was bedded down at Adobe by my old friend the Captain,
and then lay thinking of this cavalry business. It is a subject which
thought does not simplify, but, like other great things, makes it
complicate and recede from its votaries. To know essential details from
unessential details is the study in all arts. Details there must be;
they are the small things that make the big things. To apply this
general order of things to this arm of the service kept me awake. There
is first the riding--simple enough if they catch you young. There are
bits, saddles, and cavalry packs. I know men who have not spoken to each
other in years because they disagree about these. There are the sore
backs and colics--that is a profession in itself. There are judgment of
pace, the battle tactics, the use of three very different weapons; there
is a world of history in this, in forty languages. Then an ever-varying
_terrain_ tops all. There are other things not confined to cavalry, but
regarded by all soldiers. The crowning peculiarity of cavalry is the
rapidity of its movement, whereby a commander can lose the carefully
built up reputation of years in about the time it takes a school-boy to
eat a marsh-mallow. After all, it is surely a hard profession--a very