Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/244

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214
Jack Heaton

like the rest of them. So it came about I was assigned to M Troop, 315th Cavalry, U. S. A.

Now Wyoming is different from the Amazon country in that there are no trees and the ground is covered with short, sunburned buffalo grass. From the post I could see the Rocky Mountains a hundred miles away and from this you may conclude that after Nature got tired of making all the other countries she made Wyoming—but not so, for Arizona came after.

To make up for whatever the scenery may have lacked the post was a marvel and neither money nor labor had been spared to make it comfortable. I’ve been in apartment houses on Riverside Drive that couldn’t hold a candle to it. There were large two story brick barracks with big squad rooms where we bunked and a big mess hall where we ate. In front of the barracks was the drill ground and there for an hour and a half every morning we did the dismounted drill of the cavalryman and then the rest of the morning was given over to equitation, which in every day American means riding.

Our horses were of the genuine western variety and—woe be me—most of them had never