At Mangaldan a cavalry outfit replaced our
mounted infantrymen, and while the members of our new escort were
resting under the shade of a tree in the cemetery, I heard them
voicing joyful anticipations of the easy time they were to have
travelling with tenderfeet. I made up ray mind to give them some
healthful exercise on the trip.
Having first visited the work at the lower end of the Benguet Road and
then travelled across country in a driving storm over wretched trails,
we reached Bauang, our point of departure for the interior. Here I
called the sergeant in charge and asked him where were the extra shoes
for our horses. In some confusion he confessed that he had brought
none, whereupon I read him a homily on the duties of a cavalryman,
and sent the whole outfit to San Fernando to get the horses reshod
and provided with extra shoes for the trip.
We arrived at Baguio in a howling typhoon. When we emerged from the
hills into the open, and our horses got the full sweep of the storm,
they at first refused to face it. We forced them into it, however,
and a few moments later had found refuge in the house of Mr. Otto
Scheerer, a hospitable German. The cavalrymen and the horses got in
under the building. It gave me great joy to hear through the floor
the voice of the sergeant remarking, with much emphasis of the sort
best represented in print by dashes, that if he had known the sort
of a trip he was starting on he would have been on sick report the
morning of his departure.
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