Rung Ho! / Mundy, Talbot, 1879-1940

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Title: Rung Ho!

Author: Talbot Mundy

Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5153]
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[This file was first posted on May 16, 2002]

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RUNG HO!
           A Novel by Talbot Mundy



RUNG HO!

CHAPTER I

    Howrah City bows the knee
    More or less to masters three,
            King, and Prince, and Siva.
    Howrah City pays in pain
    Taxes which the royal twain
    Give to priests, to give again
            (More or less) to Siva.

THAT was no time or place for any girl of twenty to be wandering
unprotected.  Rosemary McClean knew it;  the old woman, of the sweeper
caste, that is no caste at all,--the hag with the flat breasts and
wrinkled skin, who followed her dogwise, and was no more protection
than a toothless dog,--knew it well, and growled about it in
incessant undertones that met with neither comment nor response.

"Leave a pearl of price to glisten on the street, yes!" she grumbled.
"Perhaps none might notice it--perhaps!  But her--here--at this
time--"  She would continue in a rumbling growl of half-prophetic
catalogues of evil--some that she had seen to happen, some that she
imagined, and not any part of which was in the least improbable.

As the girl passed through the stenching, many-hued bazaar, the roar
would cease for a second and then rise again.  Turbaned and pugreed--
Mohammedan and Hindoo--men of all grades of color, language, and
belief, but with only one theory on women, would stare first at the
pony that she rode, then at her, and then at the ancient grandmother
who trotted in her wake.  Low jests would greet the grandmother, and
then the trading and the gambling would resume, together with the
under-thread of restlessness that was so evidently there and yet so
hard to lay a finger on.

The sun beat down pitilessly--brass--like the din of cymbals.
Beneath the sun helmet that sat so squarely and straightforwardly on
the tidy chestnut curls, her face was pale.  She smiled as she guided
her pony in and out amid the roaring throng, and carefully refused to
see the scowls, her brave little shoulders seconded a pair of quiet,
brave gray eyes in showing an unconquerable courage to the world, and
her clean, neat cotton riding-habit gave the lie and the laugh in one
to poverty;  but, as the crowd had its atmosphere of secret murmuring,
she had another of secret anxiety.

Neither had fear.  She did not believe in it.  She was there to help
her father fight inhuman wrong, and die, if need be, in the last ditch.
 The crowd had none, for it had begun to realize that it was part a of
a two-hundred-million crowd, held down and compelled by less than a
hundred thousand aliens.  And, least of all, had the man who followed
her at a little distance the slightest sense of fear.  He was far more
conversant with it than she, but--unlike her, and far more than the
seething crowd--he knew the trend of events, and just what likelihood
there was of insult or injury to Rosemary McClean being avenged in a
generation.

He caused more comment than she, and of a different kind.  His
rose-pink pugree, with the egret and the diamond brooch to hold the
egret in its place--his jeweled sabre--his swaggering, almost
ruffianly air--were no more meant to escape attention than his
charger that clattered and kicked among the crowd, or his following,
who cleared a way for him with the butt ends of their lances.  He rode
ahead, but every other minute a mounted sepoy would reach out past him
and drive his lance-end into the ribs of some one in the way.

There would follow much deep salaaming;  more than one head would bow
very low indeed;  and in many languages, by the names of many gods, he
would be cursed in undertones.  Aloud, they would bless him and call
him "Heaven-born!"

But he took no interest whatever in the crowd.  His dark-brown eyes
were fixed incessantly on Rosemary McClean's back.  Whenever she turned
a corner in the crowded maze of streets, he would spur on in a hurry
until she was in sight again, and then his handsome, swarthy face would
light with pleasure--wicked pleasure--self-assertive, certain,
cruel.  He would rein in again to let her draw once more ahead.

Rosemary McClean knew quite well who was following her, and knew, too,
that she could do nothing to prevent him.  Once, as she passed a
species of caravansary--low-roofed, divided into many lockable
partitions, and packed tight with babbling humanity--she caught sight
of a pair of long, black thigh boots, silver-spurred, and of a polished
scabbard that moved spasmodically, as though its owner were impatient.

"Mahommed Gunga!" she muttered to herself.  "I wonder whether he would
come to my assistance if I needed him.  He fought once--or so he says
--for the British;  he might be loyal still.  I wonder what he is
doing here, and what--Oh, I wonder!"

She was very careful not to seem to look sideways, or seek acquaintance
with the wearer of the boots;  had she done so, she would have gained
nothing, for the moment that he caught sight of her through the opened
door he drew back into a shadow, and swore lustily.  What he said to
himself would have been little comfort to her.

"By the breath of God!" he growled.  "These preachers of new creeds are
the last straw, if one were wanting!  They choose the one soft place
where Mohammedan and Hindoo think alike, and smite!  If I wanted to
raise hell from end to end of Hind, I too would preach a new creed, and
turn good-looking women loose to wander on the country-side!--Ah!"
He drew back even further, as he spied the egret and the sabre and the
stallion cavorting down the street--then thought better of it and
strode swaggering to the doorway, and stood, crimson-coated, in the
sunlight, stroking upward insolently at his black, fierce-barbered
beard.  There was a row of medal ribbons on his left breast that bore
out something at least of his contention;  he had been loyal to the
British once, whether he was so now or not.

The man on the charger eyed him sideways and passed on.  Mahommed Gunga
waited.  One of the prince's followers rode close to him--leaned low
from the saddle--and leered into his face.

"Knowest not enough to salute thy betters?" he demanded.

Mahommed Gunga made a movement with his right hand in the direction of
his left hip--one that needed no explanation;  the other legged his
horse away, and rode on, grinning nastily.  To reassure himself of his
superiority over everybody but his master, he spun his horse presently
so that its rump struck against a tented stall, and upset tent and
goods.  Then he spent two full minutes in outrageous execration of the
men who struggled underneath the gaudy cloth, before cantering away,
looking, feeling, riding like a fearless man again. Mahommed Gunga
sneered after him, and spat, and turned his back on the sunshine and
the street.

"I had a mind to teach that Hindoo who his betters are!" he growled.

"Come in, risaldar-sahib!" said a voice persuasively.  "By your own
showing the hour is not yet--why spill blood before the hour?"

The Rajput swaggered to the dark door, spurs jingling, looking back
across his shoulder once or twice, as though he half-regretted leaving
the Hindoo horseman's head upon his shoulders.

"Come in, sahib," advised the voice again.  "They be many.  We are few.
And, who knows--our roads may lie together yet."

Mahommed Gunga kicked his scabbard clear, and strode through the door.
The shadows inside and the hum of voices swallowed him as though he
were a big, red, black-legged devil reassimilated in the brewing broth
of trouble;  but his voice boomed deep and loud after he had
disappeared from view.

"When their road and my road lie together, we will travel all feet
foremost!" he asserted.

Ten turnings further away by that time, Rosemary McClean pressed on
through the hot, dinning swarm of humanity, missing no opportunity to
slip her pony through an opening, but trying, too, to seem unaware that
she was followed.  She chose narrow, winding ways, where the awnings
almost met above the middle of the street, and where a cavalcade of
horsemen would not be likely to follow her--only to hear a roar
behind her, as the prince's escort started slashing at the awnings with
their swords.

There was a rush and a din of shouting beside her and ahead, as the
frightened merchants scurried to pull down their awnings before the
ruthless horse-men could ride down on them;  the narrow street
transformed itself almost on the instant into a undraped, cleared
defile between two walls.  And after that she kept to the broader
streets, where there was room in the middle for a troop to follow, four
abreast, should it choose.  She had no mind to seek her own safety at
the expense of men whose souls her father was laboring so hard to save.

She got no credit, though, for consideration--only blame for what the
swordsmen had already done.  One man--a Maharati trader--
half-naked, his black hair coiled into a shaggy rope and twisted up
above his neck--followed her, side-tracking through the mazy byways
of the bewildering mart, and coming out ahead of her--or lurking
beside bales of merchandise and waiting his opportunity to leap from
shadow into shadow unobserved.

He followed her until she reached the open, where a double row of trees
on each side marked the edge of a big square, large enough for the
drilling of an army.  Along one side of the square there ran the high
brick wall, topped with a kind of battlement, that guarded the
Maharajah's palace grounds from the eyes of men.

Just as she turned, just as she was starting to canter her pony beside
the long wall, he leaped out at her and seized her reins.  The old
woman screamed, and ran to the wall and cowered there.

Very likely the man only meant to frighten her and heap insults on her,
for in '56, though wrath ran deep and strong, men waited.  There was to
be sudden, swift whelming when the time came, not intermittent outrage.
But he had no time to do more than rein her pony back onto its
haunches.

There came a clatter of scurrying hoofs behind, and from a whirl of
dust, topped by a rose-pink pugree, a steel blade swooped down on her
and him.  A surge of brown and pink and cream, and a dozen rainbow
tints flashed past her;  a long boot brushed her saddle on the off
side.  There was a sickening sound, as something hard swished and
whicked home;  her pony reeled from the shock of a horse's shoulder,
and--none too gently--none too modestly--the prince with the
egret and the handsome face reined in on his horse's haunches and
saluted her.

There was blood, becoming dull-brown in the dust between them.  He
shook his sabre, and the blood dripped from it then he held it
outstretched, and a horseman wiped it, before he returned it with a
clang.

"The sahiba's servant!" he said magnificently, making no motion to let
her pass, but twisting with his sword-hand at his waxed mustache and
smiling darkly.

She looked down between them at the thing that but a minute since had
lived, and loved perhaps as well as hated.

"Shame on you, Jaimihr-sahib!" she said, shuddering.  A year ago she
would have fallen from her pony in a swoon, but one year of Howrah and
its daily horrors had so hardened her that she could look and loathe
without the saving grace of losing consciousness.

"The shame would have been easier to realize, had I taken more than one
stroke!" he answered irritably, still blocking the way on his great
horse, still twisting at his mustache point, still looking down at her
through eyes that blazed a dozen accumulated centuries' store of
lawless ambition.  He was proud of that back-handed swipe of his that
would cleave a man each time at one blow from shoulder-joint to ribs,
severing the backbone.  A woman of his own race would have been singing
songs in praise of him and his skill in swordsman-ship already;  but no
woman of his own race would have looked him in the eye like that and
dared him, nor have done what she did next.  She leaned over and
swished his charger with her little whip, and slipped past him.

He swore, deep and fiercely, as he spurred and wheeled, and cantered
after her.  His great stallion could overhaul her pony in a minute,
going stride for stride;  the wall was more than two miles long with no
break in it other than locked gates;  there was no hurry.  He watched
her through half-closed, glowering, appraising eyes as he cantered in
her wake, admiring the frail, slight figure in the gray cotton habit,
and bridling his desire to make her--seize her reins, and halt, and
make her--admit him master of the situation.

As he reached her stirrup, she reined in and faced him, after a hurried
glance that told her her duenna had failed her.  The old woman was
invisible.

"Will you leave that body to lie there in the dust and sun?" she asked
indignantly.

"I am no vulture, or jackal, or hyena, sahiba!" he smiled.  "I do not
eat carrion!"  He seemed to think that that was a very good retort, for
he showed his wonderful white teeth until his handsome face was the
epitome of self-satisfied amusement.  His horse blocked the way again,
and all retreat was cut off, for his escort were behind her, and three
of them had ridden to the right, outside the row of trees, to cut off
possible escape in that direction.  "Was it not well that I was near,
sahiba?  Would it have been better to die at the hands of a Maharati of
no caste--?"

"Than to see blood spilt--than to be beholden to a murderer?
Infinitely better!  There was no need to kill that man--I could have
quieted him.  Let me pass, please, Jaimihr-sahib!"

He reined aside;  but if she thought that cold scorn or hot anger would
either of them quell his ardor, she had things reversed.  The less she
behaved as a native woman would have done--the more she flouted him
--the more enthusiastic he became.

"Sahiba!"--he trotted beside her, his great horse keeping up easily
with her pony's canter--"I have told you oftener than once that I
make a good friend and a bad enemy!"

"And I have answered oftener than once that I do not need your
friendship, and am not afraid of you!  You forget that the British
Government will hold your royal brother liable for my safety and my
father's!"

"You, too, overlook certain things, sahiba."  He spoke evenly, with a
little space between each word.  With the dark look that accompanied
it, with the blood barely dry yet on the dusty road behind, his speech
was not calculated to reassure a slip of a girl, gray-eyed or not,
stiff-chinned or not, borne up or not by Scots enthusiasm for a cause.
"This is a native state.  My brother rules.  The British--"

"Are near enough, and strong enough, to strike and to bring you and
your brother to your knees if you harm a British woman!" she retorted.
"You forget--when the British Government gives leave to missionaries
to go into a native state, it backs them up with a strong arm!"

"You build too much on the British and my brother, sahiba!  Listen--
Howrah is as strong as I am, and no stronger.  Had he been stronger, he
would have slain me long ago.  The British are--"  He checked himself
and trotted beside her in silence for a minute.  She affected complete
indifference;  it was as though she had not heard him;  if she could
not be rid of him, she at least knew how to show him his utter
unimportance in her estimation.

"Have you heard, sahiba, of the Howrah treasure?  Of the rubies?  Of
the pearls?  Of the emeralds?  Of the bars of gold?  It is foolishness,
of course;  we who are modern-minded see the crime of hoarding all that
wealth, and adding to it, for twenty generations.  Have you heard of
it, sahiba?"

"Yes!"  she answered savagely, swishing at his charger again to make
him keep his distance.  "You have told me of it twice.  You have told
me that you know where it is, and you have offered to show it to me.
You have told me that you and your brother Maharajah Howrah and the
priests of Siva are the only men who know where it is, and you lust for
that treasure!  I can see you lust!  You think that I lust too, and you
make a great mistake Jaimihr-sahib!  You see, I remember what you have
told me.  Now, go away and remember what I tell you.  I care for you
and for your treasure exactly that!"  She hit his charger with all her
might, and at the sting of the little whip he shied clear of the road
before the Rajah's brother could rein him in.

Again her effort to destroy his admiration for her had directly the
opposite effect.  He swore, and he swore vengeance;  but he swore, too,
that there was no woman in the East so worth a prince's while as this
one, who dared flout him with her riding-whip before his men!

"Sahiba!" he said, sidling close to her again, and bowing in the saddle
in mock cavalier humility.  "The time will come when your government
and my brother, who--at present--is Maharajah Howrah--will be of
little service to you.  Then, perhaps, you may care to recall my
promise to load all the jewels you can choose out of the treasure-house
on you.  Then, perhaps, you may, remember that I said 'a throne is
better than a grave, sahiba.'  Or else--"

"Or else what, Jaimihr-sahib?"  She reined again and wheeled about and
faced him--pale-trembling a little--looking very small and frail
beside him on his great war-horse, but not flinching under his gaze for
a single second.

"Or else, sahiba--I think you saw me slay the Maharati?  Do you think
that I would stop at anything to accomplish what I had set out to do?
See, sahiba--there is a little blood there on your jacket!  Let that
be for a pledge between us--for a sign--or a token of my oath that
on the day I am Maharajah Howrah, you are Maharanee--mistress of all
the jewels in the treasure-house!"

She shuddered.  She did not look to find the blood;  she took his word
for that, if for nothing else.

"I wonder you dare tell me that you plot against your brother!"  That
was more a spoken thought than a statement or a question.

"I would be very glad if you would warn my brother!" he answered her;
and she knew like a flash, and on the instant, that what he said was
true.  She had been warned before she came to bear no tales to any one.
No Oriental would believe the tale, coming from her;  the Maharajah
would arrest her promptly, glad of the excuse to vent his hatred of
Christian missionaries.  Jaimihr would attempt a rescue;  it was common
knowledge that he plotted for the throne.  There would be instant civil
war, in which the British Government would perforce back up the alleged
protector of a defenseless woman.  There would be a new Maharajah;
then, in a little while, and in all likelihood, she would have
disappeared forever while the war raged.  There would be, no doubt, a
circumstantial story of her death from natural causes.

She did not answer. She stared back at him, and he smiled down at her,
twisting at his mustache.

"Think!" he said, nodding.  "A throne, sahiba, is considerably better
than a grave!"  Then he wheeled like a sudden dust-devil and decamped
in a cloud of dust, followed at full pelt by his clattering escort.
She watched their horses leap one after the other the corpse of the
Maharati that lay by the corner where it fell, and she saw the last of
them go clattering, whirling up the street through the bazaar.  The old
hag rose out of a shadow and trotted after her again as she turned and
rode on, pale-faced and crying now a little, to the little begged
school place where her father tried to din the alphabet into a dozen
low-caste fosterlings.

"Father!" she cried, and she all but fell out of the saddle into his
arms as the tall, lean Scotsman came to the door to meet her and stood
blinking in the sunlight. "Father, I've seen another man killed!  I've
had another scene with Jaimihr!  I can't endure it!  I--I--Oh, why
did I ever come?"

"I don't know, dear," he answered.  "But you would come, wouldn't you?"




CHAPTER II


    'Twixt loot and law--'tween creed and caste--
    Through slough this people wallows,
    To where we choose our road at last.
    I choose the RIGHT! Who follows?

HEMMED in amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary,
secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other
Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga--all six, according to their turbans,
followers of Islam--discussed matters that appeared to bring them
little satisfaction.

They sat together in a dark, low-ceilinged room;  its open door--it
was far too hot to close anything that admitted air--gave straight
onto the street, and the one big window opened on a courtyard, where a
pair of game-cocks fought in and out between the restless legs of
horses, while a yelling horde betted on them.  On a heap of grass
fodder in a corner of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony
thumped a skin tom-tom with his knuckles, while at his feet the
own-blood brother to the screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a
wind instrument.

Din--glamour--stink--incessant movement--interblended poverty
and riches rubbing shoulders--noisy self-interest side by side with
introspective revery, where stray priests nodded in among the traders,
--many-peopled India surged in miniature between the four hot walls and
through the passage to the overflowing street;  changeable and
unexplainable, in ever-moving flux, but more conservative in spite of
it than the very rocks she rests on--India who is sister to Aholibah
and mother of all fascination.

In that room with the long window, low-growled, the one thin thread of
clear-sighted unselfishness was reeling out to very slight approval.
Mahommed Gunga paced the floor and kicked his toes against the walls,
as he turned at either end, until his spurs jingled, and looked with
blazing dark-brown eyes from one man to the other.

"What good ever came of listening to priests?" he asked. "All priests
are alike--ours, and theirs, and padre-sahibs!  They all preach peace
and goad the lust that breeds war and massacre!  Does a priest serve
any but himself?  Since when?  There will come this rising that the
priests speak of--yes!  Of a truth, there will, for the priests will
see to it!  There is a padre-sahib here in Howrah now for the Hindoo
priests to whet their hate on.  You saw the woman ride past here a
half-hour gone?  There is a pile of tinder ready here, and any fool of
a priest can make a spark!  There will be a rising, and a big one!"

"There will!  Of a truth, there will!"  Alwa, his cousin, crossed one
leg above the other with a clink of spurs and scabbard.  He had no
objection to betraying interest, but declined for the present to betray
his hand.

"There will be a blood-letting that will do no harm to us Rajputs!"
said another man, whose eyes gleamed from the darkest corner;  he, too,
clanked his scabbard as though the sound were an obbligato to his
thoughts.  "Sit still and say nothing is my advice;  we will be all
ready to help ourselves when the hour comes!"

"It is this way," said Mahommed Gunga, standing straddle-legged to face
all five of them, with his back to the window.  He stroked his black
beard upward with one hand and fingered with the other at his
sabre-hilt.  "Without aid when the hour does come, the English will be
smashed--worn down--starved out--surrounded--stamped out--
annihilated--so!"  He stamped with his heel descriptively on the hard
earth floor.  "And then, what?"

"Then, the plunder!" said Alwa, showing a double row of wonderful white
teeth.  The other four grinned like his reflections.  "Ay, there will
be plunder--for the priests!   And we Rajputs will have new masters
over us!  Now, as things are, we have honorable men.  They are fools,
for any man is a fool who will not see and understand the signs.  But
they are honest.  They ride straight!  They look us straight between
the eyes, and speak truth, and fear nobody!  Will the Hindoo  priests,
who will rule India afterward, be thus?  Nay!  Here is one sword for
the British when the hour comes!"

"I have yet to see a Hindoo priest rule me or plunder me!" said Alwa
with a grin.

"You will live to see it!" said Mahommed Gunga.  "Truly, you will live
to see it, unless you throw your weight into the other scale!  What are
we Rajputs without a leader whom we all trust?  What have we ever
been?"  He swung on his heels suddenly--angrily--and began to pace
the floor again--then stopped.

"Divided, and again subdivided--one-fifth Mohammedan and four-fifths
Hindoo--clan within clan, and each against the other.  Do we own
Rajputana?  Nay!  Do we rule it?  Nay!  What were we until
Cunnigan-bahadur came?"

"Ah!"  All five men rose with a clank in honor to the memory of that
man.  "Cunnigan-bahadur!  Show us such another man as he was, and I and
mine ride at his back!" said Alwa.  "Not all the English are like
Cunnigan!  A Cunnigan could have five thousand men the minute that he
asked for them!"

"Am I a wizard?--Can I cast spells and bring dead men's spirits from
the dead again?  I know of no man to take his place," said Mahommed
Gunga sadly.

He was the poorest of them, but they were all, comparatively speaking,
poor men;  for the long peace had told its tale on a race of men who
are first gentlemen, then soldiers, and last--least of all--and
only as a last resource, landed proprietors.  The British, for whom
they had often fought because that way honor seemed to lie, had
impoverished them afterward by passing and enforcing zemindary laws
that lifted nine-tenths of the burden from the necks of starving
tenants.  The new law was just, as the Rajputs grudgingly admitted, but
it pinched their pockets sadly;  like the old-time English squires,
they would give their best blood and their last rack-rent-wrung rupee
for the cause that they believed in, but they resented interference
with the rack-rents!  Mahommed Gunga had had influence enough with
these five landlord relations of his to persuade them to come and meet
him in Howrah City to discuss matters;  the mere fact that he had
thought it worth his while to leave his own little holding in the north
had satisfied them that he would be well worth listening to--for no
man rode six hundred miles on an empty errand.  But they needed
something more than words before they pledged the word that no Rajput
gentleman will ever break.

"Find us a Cunnigan--bring him to us--prove him to us--and if a
blade worth having from end to end of Rajputana is not at his service,
I myself will gut the Hindoo owner of it!  That is my given word!" said
Alwa.

"He had a son," said Mahommed Gunga quietly.

"True.  Are all sons like their fathers?  Take Maharajah Howrah here;
his father was a man with whom any soldier might be proud to pick a
quarrel.  The present man is afraid of his own shadow on the wall--
divided between love for the treasure-chests he dare not broach and
fear of a brother whom he dare not kill.  He is priest-ridden,
priest-taught, and fit to be nothing but a priest.  Who knows how young
Cunnigan will shape?  Where is he?  Overseas yet!  He must prove
himself, as his father did, before he can hope to lead a free regiment
of horse!"

"Then Cunnigan-bahadur's watch-word 'For the peace of India,' is
dead-died with him?" asked Mahommed Gunga.  "We are each for our own
again?"

"I have spoken!" answered Alwa.  As the biggest clan-chief left on all
that countryside, he had a right to speak before the others, and he
knew that what he said would carry weight when they had all ridden home
again, and the report had gone abroad in ever-widening rings.  "If the
English can hold India, let them!  I will not fight against them, for
they are honest men for all their madness.  If they cannot, then I am
for Rajputana, not India--India may burn or rot or burst to pieces,
so long as Rajputana stands!  But--"  He paused a moment, and looked
at each man in turn, and tapped his sabre-hilt, "--if a
Cunnigan-bahadur were among us--a man whom I could trust to lead me
and mine and every man--I would lend him my sword for the sheer honor
of helping him hack truth out of corruption!  I have nothing more to
say!"

"One word more, cousin!" said Mahommed Gunga.  "I was risaldar in
Cunnigan-bahadur's regiment of horse.  There was more than mere
discipline between us.  I ate his salt.  Once--when he might have
saved himself the trouble without any daring to reproach him--he
risked his own life, and a troop, and his reputation to save a woman of
my family from capture, and something worse.  There was never a Rajput
or any other native woman wronged while he was with us."

"Well?"

"I am no friend of Christian priests--of padres. But--"

"She who rode by just now?  What, then?"

"I ride northward now, and then very likely South again.  I can do
nothing in the matter, yet--were he in my shoes, and she a native
woman at the mercy of the troops--Cunnigan-bahadur would have
assigned a guard for her."

"Ho!  So I am thy sepoy?" sneered Alwa, standing sideways--looking
sideways--and throwing out his chest.  "I am to do thy bidding,
guarding stray padres"  (he spoke the word as though it were a bad
taste he was spitting from his mouth),  "and herding women without
purdah, while thou ridest on assignations Allah knows where?  Since
when?"

"I have yet to refuse to guard thy back, or thy good name, Alwa!"
Mahommed Gunga eyed him straight, and thrust his hilt out.  "The woman
is nothing to me--the padre-sahib less.  It is because of the debt I
owe to Cunnigan that I ask this favor."

"Oh.  It is granted!  Should she appeal to me, I will rip Howrah into
rags and burn this city to protect her if need be!  She must first ask,
though, even as thou didst."

Mahommed Gunga saluted him, bolt-upright as a lance, and without the
slightest change in his expression.

"The word is sufficient, cousin!"

Alwa returned his salute, and raised his voice in a gruff command.  A
saice outside the window woke as though struck by a stick--sprang to
his feet--and passed the order on.  A dozen horses clattered in the
courtyard and filed through the arched passage to the street, and Alwa
mounted.  The others, each with his escort, followed suit, and a moment
later, with no further notice of one another, but with as much pomp and
noise as though they owned the whole of India, the five rode off, each
on his separate way, through the scattering crowd.

Then Mahommed Gunga called for his own horse and the lone armed man of
his own race who acted squire to him.

"Did any overhear our talk?" he asked.

"No, sahib."

"Not the saice, even?"

"No, sahib.  He slept."

"He awoke most suddenly, and at not much noise."

"For that reason I know he slept, sahib.  Had he been pretending, he
would have wakened slowly."

"Thou art no idiot!" said Mahommed Gunga.  "Wait here until I return,
and lie a few lies if any ask thee why we six came together, and of
what we spoke!"

Then he mounted and rode off slowly, picking his way through the throng
much more cautiously and considerately than his relatives had done,
though not, apparently, because he loved the crowd.  He used some
singularly biting insults to help clear the way, and frowned as though
every other man he looked at were either an assassin or--what a good
Mohammedan considers worse--an infidel.  He reached the long brick
wall at last--broke into a canter--scattered the pariah dogs that
were nosing and quarreling about the corpse of the Maharati, and drew
rein fifteen minutes later by the door of the tiny school place that
Miss McClean had entered.




CHAPTER III


For service truly rendered, and for duty dumbly done--
For men who neither tremble nor forget--
There is due reward, my henchman. There is honor to be won.
There is watch and ward and sterner duty yet.

No sound came, from within the schoolhouse.  The little building,
coaxed from a grudging Maharajah, seemed to strain for light and air
between two overlapping, high-walled brick warehouses.  Before the
door, in a spot where the scorching sun-rays came but fitfully between
a mesh of fast-decaying thatch, the old hag who had followed Rosemary
McClean lay snoozing, muttering to herself, and blinking every now and
then as a street dog blinks at the passers-by.  She took no notice of
Mahommed Gunga until he swore at her.

"Miss-sahib hai?" he growled;  and the woman jumped up in a hurry and
went inside.  A moment later Rosemary McClean stood framed in the
doorway still in her cotton riding-habit, very pale--evidently
frightened at the summons--but strangely, almost ethereally,
beautiful.  Her wealth of chestnut hair was loosely coiled above her
neck, as though she had been caught in the act of dressing it.  She
looked like the wan, wasted spirit of human pity--he like a great,
grim war-god.

"Salaam, Miss Maklin-sahib!"

He dismounted as he spoke and stood at attention, then stared
truculently, too inherently chivalrous to deny her civility--he would
have cut his throat as soon as address her from horseback while she
stood--and too contemptuous of her father's calling to be more civil
than he deemed in keeping with his honor.

"Salaam, Mohammed Gunga!"  She seemed very much relieved, although
doubtful yet.  "Not letters again?"

"No, Miss-sahib.  I am no mail-carrier!  I brought those letters as a
favor to Franklin-sahib at Peshawur;  I was coming hither, and he had
no man to send.  I will take letters, since I am now going, if there
are letters ready;  I ride to-night."

"Thank you, Mahommed Gunga.  I have letters for England.  They are not
yet sealed.  May I send them to you before you start?"

"I will send my man for them.  Also, Miss Maklin-sahib"  (heavens! how
much cleaner and better that sounded than the prince's ironical
"sahiba"!)

"If you wish it, I will escort you to Peshawur, or to any city between
here and there."

"But--but why?"

"I saw Jaimihr. I know Jaimihr."

"And--"

"And--this is no place for a padre, or for the daughter of a padre."

What he said was true, but it was also insolent, said insolently.

"Mahommed Gunga-sahib, what are those ribbons on your breast?" she
asked him.

He glanced down at them, and his expression changed a trifle;  it was
scarcely perceptible, but underneath his fierce mustache the muscles of
his mouth stiffened.

"They are medal ribbons--for campaigns," he answered.

"Three-four-five!  Then, you were a soldier a long time?  Did you--
did you desert your post when there was danger?"

He flushed, and raised his hand as though about to speak.

"Or did people insult you when you chose to remain on duty?"

"Miss-sahib, I have not insulted you!" said Mahommed Gunga.  "I came
here for another purpose."

"You came, very kindly, to ask whether there were letters.  Thank you,
Mahommed Gunga-sahib, for your courtesy.  There are letters, and I will
give them to your man, if you will be good enough to send him for them."

He still stood there, staring at her with eyes that did not blink.  He
was too much of a soldier to admit himself at a loss what to say, yet
he had no intention of leaving Howrah without saying it, for that, too,
would have been unsoldierly.

"The reason why your countrymen have found men of this land before now
to fight for them--one reason, at least--" he said gruffly, "is that
hitherto they have not meddled with our religions.  It is not safe!  It
would be better to come away, Miss-sahib."

"Would you like to say that to my father?  He is--"

"Allah forbid that I should argue with him!  I spoke to you, on your
account!"

"You forget, I think," she answered him gently, "that we had permission
from the British Government to come here;  it has not been withdrawn.
We are doing no harm here--trying only to do good.  There is always
danger when--"

"I would speak of that," he interrupted--"You will not come away?"

She shook her head.

"Your father could remain."

She shook her head again. "I stay with him," she answered.

"At present, Jaimihr is the danger, Miss-sahib;  but I think that at
present he will dare do nothing.  The Maharajah dare do nothing either,
yet.  Should either of them make a move to interfere with you, it would
not be safe to appeal to the other one.  You will not understand, but
it is so.  In that event, there is a way to safety of which I would
warn you."

"Thank you, Mahommed Gunga. What is it?"

"There are men more than a day's ride away from here who are to be
depended on--by you, at least--under all circumstances.  Is that
old woman to be trusted?"

"How should I know?" she smiled.  "I believe she is fond of me."

"That should be enough.  I would like, if the Miss-sahib will permit,
to speak with her."

At a word from Miss McClean the old hag came out into the sun again and
blinked at the Rajput, very much afraid of him.  Mahommed Gunga saluted
Miss McClean--swore at the old woman--pointed a wordless order with
his right arm--watched her shuffle half a hundred yards up-street--
followed her, and growled at her for about five minutes, while she
nodded.  Finally, he drew from the pocket of his crimson coat a small
handful of gold mohurs--fat, dignified coins that glittered--and
held them out toward her with an air as though they meant nothing to
him--positively nothing--Her eyes gleamed.  He let her take a good
look at the money before replacing it, then tossed her a silver
quarter-rupee piece, saluted Miss McClean again--for she was watching
the pantomime from the doorway still--and mounted and rode off, his
back looking like the back of one who has neither care nor fear nor
master.

At the caravansary his squire came running out to hold his stirrup.

"Picket the horse in the yard," said Mahommed Gunga, "then find me
another servant and bring him to me in the room here!"

"Another servant?  But, sahib--"

"I said another servant!  Has deafness overcome thee?"  He used a word
in the dialect which left no room for doubt as to his meaning;  it was
to be a different servant--a substitute for the squire he had
already.  The squire bowed his head in disciplined obedience and led
the horse away.

An hour later--evening was drawing on--he came back, followed by a
somewhat ruffianly-looking half-breed Rajput-Punjaubi.  The new man was
rather ragged and lacked one eye, but with the single eye he had he
looked straight at his prospective master.  Mahommed Gunga glared at
him, but the man did not quail or shrink.

"This fellow wishes honorable service, sahib."  The squire spoke as
though he were calling his master's attention to a horse that was for
sale.  "I have seen his family;  I have inquired about him;  and I have
explained to him that unless he serves at thee faithfully his wife and
his man child will die at my hands in his absence."

"Can he groom a horse?"

"So he says, sahib, and so say others."

"Can he fight?"

"He slew the man with his bare hands who pricked his eye out with a
sword."

"Oh!  What payment does he ask?"

"He leaves that matter to your honor's pleasure."

"Good.  Instruct him, then.  Set him to cleaning my horse and then
return here."

The squire was back again within five minutes and stood before Mahommed
Gunga in silent expectation.

"I shall miss thee," said Mahommed Gunga after five minutes'
reflection.  "It is well that I have other servants in the north."

"In what have I offended, sahib?"

"In nothing.  Therefore there is a trust imposed."

The man salaamed.  Mahommed Gunga produced his little handful of gold
mohurs and divided it into two equal portions;  one he handed to the
squire.

"Stay here.  Be always either in the caravansary or else at call.
Should the old woman who serves Miss Maklin-sahib, the padre-sahib's
daughter come and ask thy aid, then saddle swiftly the three horses I
will leave with thee, and bear Miss Maklin-sahib and her father to my
cousin Alwa's place.  Present two of the gold mohurs to the hag, should
that happen."

"But sahib--two mohurs?  I could buy ten such hags outright for the
price!"

"She has my word in the matter!  It is best to have her eager to win
great reward.  The hag will stay awake, but see to it that thou
sleepest not!"

"And for how long must I stay here, sahib?"

"One month--six months--a year--who knows?  Until the hag summons
thee, or I, by writing or by word of mouth, relieve thee of thy trust."

At sunset he sent the squire to Miss McClean for the letters he had
promised to deliver;  and at one hour after sunset, when the heat of
the earth had begun to rise and throw back a hot blast to the darkened
sky and the little eddies of luke-warm surface wind made movement for
horse and man less like a fight with scorching death, he rode off, with
his new servant, on the two horses left to him of the five with which
he came.

A six-hundred-mile ride without spare horses, in the heat of northern
India, was an undertaking to have made any strong man flinch.  The
stronger the man, and the more soldierly, the better able he would be
to realize the effort it would call for.  But Mahommed Gunga rode as
though he were starting on a visit to a near-by friend;  he was not
given to crossing bridges before he reached them, nor to letting
prospects influence his peace of mind. He was a soldier.  He took
precautions first, when and where such were possible, then rode and
looked fate in the eye.

He appeared to take no more notice of the glowering looks that followed
him from stuffy balconies and dense-packed corners than of the
mosquitoes to and the heat.  Without hurry he picked his way through
the thronged streets, where already men lay in thousands to escape the
breathlessness of walled interiors;  the gutters seemed like trenches
where the dead of a devastated city had been laid;  the murmur was like
the voice of storm-winds gathering, and the little lights along the
housetops were for the vent-holes on the lid of a tormented underworld.

But he rode on at his ease.  Ahead of him lay that which he considered
duty.  He could feel the long-kept peace of India disintegrating all
around him, and he knew--he was certain--as sometimes a brave man
can see what cleverer men all overlook--that the right touch by the
right man at the right moment, when the last taut-held thread should
break, would very likely swing the balance in favor of peace again,
instead of individual self seeking anarchy.

He knew what "Cunnigan-bahadur" would have done.  He swore by
Cunnigan-bahadur.  And the memory of that same dead, desperately honest
Cunningham he swore that no personal profit or convenience or safety
should be allowed to stand between him and what was honorable and
right!  Mahommed Gunga had no secrets from himself;  nor lack of
imagination.  He knew that he was riding--not to preserve the peace
of India, for that was as good as gone--but to make possible the
winning back of it.  And he rode with a smile on his thin lips, as the
crusaders once rode on a less self-advertising errand.



CHAPTER IV


    "You have failed!" whispered Fate, and a weary civilian
    Threw up his task as a matter of course.
    "Failed?" said the soldier.  He knew a million
    Chances untackled yet. "Get me a horse!"

THAT was a strange ride of Mahommed Gunga's, and a fateful one--more
full of portent for the British Raj in India than he, or the British,
or the men amid whose homes he rode could ever have anticipated.  He
averaged a little less than twenty miles a day, and through an Indian
hot-weather, and with no spare horse, none but a born horseman--a man
of light weight and absolute control of temper--could have
accomplished that for thirty days on end.

Wherever he rode there was the same unrest.  Here and there were new
complaints he had not yet heard of, imaginary some of them, and some
only too well founded.  Wherever there were Rajputs--and that race of
fighting men is scattered all about the north--there was
ill-suppressed impatience for the bursting of the wrath to come.  They
bore no grudge against the English, but they did bear more than grudge
against the money-lenders and the fat, litigious traders who had
fattened under British rule.  At least at the beginning it was evident
that all the interest of all the Rajputs lay in letting the British get
the worst of it;  even should the British suddenly wake up and look
about them and take steps--or should the British hold their own with
native aid, and so save India from anarchy, and afterward reward the
men who helped--the Rajputs would stand to gain less individually, or
even collectively, than if they let the English be driven to the sea,
and then reverted to the age-old state of feudal lawlessness that once
had made them rich.

Many of the Hindoo element among them were almost openly disloyal.  The
ryots--the little one and two acre farmers--were the least
unsettled;  they, when he asked them--and he asked often--
disclaimed the least desire to change a rule that gave them safe
holdings and but one tax-collection a year;  they were frankly for
their individual selves--not even for one another, for the ryots as a
class.

Nobody seemed to be for India, except Mahommed Gunga;  and he said
little, but asked ever-repeated questions as he rode.  There were men
who would like to weld Rajputana into one again, and over-ride the rest
of India;  and there were other men who planned to do the same for the
Punjaub;  there were plots within plots, not many of which he learned
in anything like detail, but none of which were more than skin-deep
below the surface.  All men looked to the sudden, swift, easy whelming
of the British Raj, and then to the plundering of India;  each man
expected to be rich when the whelming came, and each man waited with
ill-controlled impatience for the priests' word that would let loose
the hundred-million flood of anarchy.

"And one man--one real man whom they trusted--one leader--one man
who had one thousand at his back--could change the whole face of
things!" he muttered to himself.  "Would God there we a Cunnigan!  But
there is no Cunnigan.  And who would follow me?  They would pull my
beard, tell me I was scheming for my own ends!--I, who was taught by
Cunnigan, and would serve only India!"

He would ride before dawn and when the evening breeze had come to cool
the hot earth a little through the blazing afternoons he would lie in
the place of honor by some open window, where he could watch a hireling
flick the flies off his lean, road-hardened horse, and listen to the
plotting and the carried tales of plots, pretending always to be
sympathetic or else open to conviction.

"A soldier?  Hah!  A soldier fights for the side that can best reward
him!" he would grin.  "And, when there is no side, perhaps he makes
one!  I am a soldier!"

If they pressed him, he would point to his medal ribbons, that he
always wore.  "The British gave me those for fighting against the
northern tribes beyond the Himalayas," he would tell them.  "The
southern tribes--Bengalis of the south and east--would give better
picking than  mere medal ribbons!"

They were not all sure of him.  They were not all satisfied why he
should ride on to Peshawur, and decline to stay with them and talk good
sedition.

"I would see how the British are!" he told them.  And he told the
truth.  But they were not quite satisfied;  he would have made a
splendid leader to have kept among them, until he--too--became too
powerful and would have to be deposed in turn.

His own holding was a long way from Peshawur, and he was no rich man
who could afford at a mere whim to ride two long days' march beyond his
goal.  Nor was he, as he had explained to Miss McClean, a
letter-carrier;  he would get no more than the merest thanks for
delivering her letters to where they could be included in the
Government mail-bag.  Yet he left the road that would have led him
homeward to his left, and carried on--quickening his pace as he
neared the frontier garrison town, and wasting, then, no time at all on
seeking information.  Nobody supposed that the Pathans and the other
frontier tribes were anything but openly rebellious, and he would have
been an idiot to ask questions about their loyalty.

Because of their disloyalty, and the ever-present danger that they
were, the biggest British garrison in India had to be kept cooped up in
Peshawur, to rot with fever and ague and the other ninety Indian
plagues.

He wanted to see that garrison again, and estimate it, and make up his
mind what exactly, or probably, the garrison would do in the event of
the rebellion blazing out.  And he wanted to try once more to warn some
one in authority, and make him see the smouldering fire beneath the
outer covering of sullen silence.

He received thanks for the letters.  He received an invitation to take
tea on the veranda of an officer so high in the British service that
many a staff major would have given a month's pay for a like
opportunity.  But he was laughed at for the advice he had to give.

"Mahommed Gunga, you're like me, you're getting old!" said the high
official.

"Not so very old, sahib.  I was a young man when Cunnigan-bahadur
raised a regiment and licked the half of Rajputana into shape with it.
Not too old, sahib, to wish there were another Cunnigan to ride with!"

"Well, Mahommed Gunga, you're closer to your wish than you suppose!
Young Cunningham's gazetted, and probably just about starting on his
way out here via the Cape of Good Hope.  He should be here in three or
four months at the outside."

"You mean that, sahib?"

"Wish I didn't!  The puppy will arrive here with altogether swollen
notions of his own importance and what is due his father's son.  He's
been captain of his college at home, and that won't lessen his sense of
self-esteem either.  I can foresee trouble with that boy!"

"Sahib, there is a service I could render!"

The Rajput spoke with a strangely constrained voice all of a sudden,
but the Commissioner did not notice it;  he was too busy pulling on a
wool-lined jacket to ward off the evening chill.

"Well, risaldar--what then?"

"I think that I could teach the son of Cunnigan-bahadur to be worth his
salt."

"If you'll teach him to be properly respectful to his betters I'll be
grateful to you, Mahommed Gunga."

"Then, sahib, I shall have certain license allowed me in the matter?"

"Do anything you like, in reason, risaldar!  Only keep the pup from
cutting his eye-teeth on his seniors' convenience, that's all!"

Mahommed Gunga wasted no time after that on talking, nor did he wait to
specify the nature of the latitude he would expect to be allowed him;
he knew better.  And he knew now that the one chance that he sought had
been given him.

Like all observant natives, he was perfectly aware that the British
weakness mostly lay in the age of the senior officers and the slowness
of promotion.  There were majors of over fifty years of age, and if a
man were a general at seventy he was considered fortunate and young.
The jealousy with which younger men were regarded would have been
humorous had it not come already so near to plunging India into anarchy.

He did not even trouble to overlook the garrison.  He took his leave,
and rode away the long two-day ride to his own place, where a sadly
attenuated rent-roll and a very sadly thinned-down company of servants
waited his coming.  There, through fourteen hurried, excited days, he
made certain arrangements about the disposition of his affairs during
an even longer absence;  he made certain sales--pledged the rent of
fifty acres for ten years, in return for an advance--and on the
fifteenth day rode southward, at the head of a five-man escort that,
for quality, was worthy of a prince.

A little less than three months later he arrived at Bombay, and by dint
of much hard bargaining and economy fitted out himself and his escort,
so that each man looked as though he were the owner of an escort of his
own.  Then, fretful at every added day that strained his
fast-diminishing resources, he settled down to wait until the ship
should come that brought young Cunningham.



CHAPTER V


    Lies home beneath a sickly sun,
            Where humbleness was taught me?
    Or here, where spurs my father won
            On bended knee are brought me?

HE landed, together with about a dozen other newly gazetted subalterns
and civil officers, cramped, storm-tossed, snubbed, and then disgorged
from a sailing-ship into a port that made no secret of its absolute
contempt for new arrivals.

There were liners of a kind on the Red Sea route, and the only seniors
who chose the long passage round the Cape were men returning after
sick-leave--none too sweet-tempered individuals, and none too prone
to give the young idea a good conceit of himself.  He and the other
youngsters landed with a crushed-in notion that India would treat them
very cavalierly before she took them to herself.  And all, save
Cunningham, were right.

The other men, all homesick and lonely and bewildered, were met by
bankers' agents, or, in cases, only by a hotel servant armed with a
letter of instructions.  Here and there a bored, tired-eyed European
had found time, for somebody-or-other's sake, to pounce on a new
arrival and bear him away to breakfast and a tawdry imitation of the
real hospitality of northern India;  but for the most part the
beardless boys lounged in the red-hot customs shed (where they were to
be mulcted for the privilege of serving their country) and envied young
Cunningham.

He--as pale as they, as unexpectant as they were of anything
approaching welcome--was first amazed, then suspicious, then pleased,
then proud, in turn.  The different emotions followed one another
across his clean-lined face as plainly as a dawn vista changes;  then,
as the dawn leaves a landscape finally, true and what it is for all to
see, true dignity was left and the look of a man who stands in armor.

"His father's son!" growled Mahommed Gunga;  and the big, black-bearded
warriors who stood behind him echoed, "Ay!"

But for four or five inches of straight stature, and a foot, perhaps,
of chest-girth, he was a second edition of the Cunnigan-bahadur who had
raised and led a regiment and licked peace into a warring countryside;
and though he was that much bigger than his father had been, they
dubbed him "Chota" Cunnigan on the instant.  And that means "Little
Cunningham."

He had yet to learn that a Rajput, be he poorest of the poor, admits no
superior on earth.  He did not know yet that these men had come, at one
man's private cost, all down the length of India to meet him.  Nobody
had told him that the feudal spirit dies harder in northern Hindustan
than it ever did in England, or that the Rajput clans cohere more
tightly than the Scots.  The Rajput belief that honest service--
unselfishly given--is the greatest gift that any man may bring--
that one who has received what he considers favors will serve the
giver's son--was an unknown creed to him as yet.

But he stood and looked those six men in the eye, and liked them.  And
they, before they had as much as heard him speak, knew him for a
soldier and loved him as he stood.

They hung sickly scented garlands round his neck, and kissed his hand
in turn, and spoke to him thereafter as man to man.  They had found
their goal worth while, and they bore him off to his hotel in
clattering glee, riding before him as men who have no doubt of the
honor that they pay themselves.  No other of the homesick subalterns
drove away with a six-man escort to clear the way and scatter sparks!

They careered round through the narrow gate of the hotel courtyard as
though a Viceroy at least were in the trap behind them;  and Mahommed
Gunga--six medaled, strapping feet of him--dismounted and held out
an arm for him to take when he alighted.  The hotel people understood
at once that Somebody from Somewhere had arrived.

Young Cunningham had never yet been somebody.  The men who give their
lives for India are nothing much at home, and their sons are even less.
Scarcely even at school, when they had made him captain of the team,
had he felt the feel of homage and the subtle flattery that undermines
a bad man's character;  at schools in England they confer honors but
take simultaneous precautions.  He was green to the dangerous influence
of feudal loyalty, but he quitted himself well, with reserve and
dignity.

"He is good!  He will do!" swore Mahommed Gunga fiercely, for the other
emotions are meant for women only.

"He is better than the best!"

"We will make a man of this one!"

"Did you mark how he handed me his purse to defray expenses?" asked a
black-bearded soldier of the five.

"He is a man who knows by instinct!" said Mahommed Gunga.  "See to it
that thy accounting is correct, and overpay no man!"

Deep-throated as a bull, erect as a lance, and pleased as a little
child, Mahommed Gunga came to him alone that evening to talk, and to
hear him talk, and to tell him of the plans that had been made.

"Thy father gave me this," he told him, producing a gold watch and
chain of the hundred-guinea kind that nowadays are only found among the
heirlooms.  Young Cunningham looked at it, and recognized the heavy
old-gold case that he had been allowed to "blow open" when a little
boy.  On the outside, deep-chiseled in the gold, was his father's
crest, and on the inside a portrait of his mother.

"Thy father died in these two arms, bahadur!  Thy father said:  'Look
after him, Mahommed Gunga, when the time is ripe for him to be a
soldier.'  And I said:  'Ha, huzoor!'  So!  Then here is India!"

He waved one hand grandiloquently, as though he were presenting the
throne of India to his protegé!

"Here, sahib, is a servant--blood of my own blood."

He clapped his hands, and a man who looked like the big, black-ended
spirit of Aladdin's lamp stood silent, instant, in the doorway.

"He speaks no English, but he may help to teach thee the Rajput tongue,
and he will serve thee well--on my honor.  His throat shall answer
for it!  Feed him and clothe him, sahib, but pay him very little--to
serve well is sufficient recompense."

Young Cunningham gave his keys at once to the silent servant, as a
tacit sign that from that moment he was trusted utterly;  and Mahommed
Gunga nodded grim approval.

"Thy father saw fit to bequeath me much in the hour when death came on
him, sahib.  I am no boaster, as he knew.  Remember, then, to tell me
if I fail at any time in what is due.  I am at thy service!"

Tact was inborn in Cunningham, as it had been in his father.  He
realized that he ought at once to show his appreciation of the high
plane of the service offered.

"There is one way in which you could help me almost at once, Mahommed
Gunga," he answered.

"Command me, sahib."

"I need your advice--the advice of a man who really knows.  I need
horses, and--at first at least--I would rather trust your judgment
than my own.  Will you help me buy them?"

The Raiput's eyes blazed pleasure.  On war, and wine, and women, and a
horse are the four points to ask a man's advice and win his approval by
the asking.

"Nay, sahib;  why buy horses here?  These Bombay traders have only
crows' meat to sell to the ill-advised.  I have horses, and spare
horses for the journey;  and in Rajputana I have horses waiting for
thee--seven, all told--sufficient for a young officer.  Six of them
are country-bred-sand-weaned--a little wild perhaps, but strong, and
up to thy weight.  The seventh is a mare, got by thy father's stallion
Aga Khan (him that made more than a hundred miles within a day under a
fifteen-stone burden, with neither food nor water, and survived!).  A
good mare, sahib--indeed a mare of mares--fit for thy father's son.
That mare I give thee.  It is little, sahib, but my best;  I am a poor
man.  The other six I bought--there is the account.  I bought them
cheaply, paying less than half the price demanded in each case--but I
had to borrow and must pay back."

Young Cunningham was hard put to it to keep his voice steady as he
answered.  This man was a stranger to him.  He had a hazy recollection
of a dozen or more bearded giants who formed a moving background to his
dreams of infancy, and he had expected some sort of welcome from one or
two perhaps, of his father's men when he reached the north.  But to
have men borrow money that they might serve him, and have horses ready
for him, and to be met like this at the gate of India by a man who
admitted he was poor, was a little more than his self-control had been
trained as yet to stand.

"I won't waste words, Mahommed Gunga," he said, half-choking.  "I'll--
er--I'll try to prove how I feel about it."

"Ha!  How said I?  Thy father's son,  I said!  He, too, was no believer
in much promising!  I was his servant, and will serve him still by
serving thee.  The honor is mine, sahib, and the advantage shall be
where thy father wished it."

"My father would never have had me--"

"Sahib, forgive the interruption, but a mistake is better checked.  Thy
father would have flung thee ungrudged, into a hell of bayonets, me,
too, and would have followed after, if by so doing he could have served
the cause he held in trust.  He bred thee, fed thee, and sent thee
oversea to grow, that in the end India might gain!  Thou and I are but
servants of the peace, as he was.  If I serve thee, and thou the Raj--
though the two of us were weaned on the milk of war and get our bread
by war--we will none the less serve peace!  Aie!  For what is honor
if a soldier lets it rust?  Of what use is service, mouthed and ready,
but ungiven?  It is good, Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, that thou art come at
last!"

He saluted and backed out through the swinging door.  He had come in
his uniform of risaldar of the elder Cunningham's now disbanded
regiment, so he had not removed his boots as another native--and he
himself if in mufti--would have done.  Young Cunningham heard him go
swaggering and clanking and spur-jingling down the corridor as though
he had half a troop of horse behind him and wanted Asia to know it!

It was something of a brave beginning that, for a twenty-one-year-old!
Something likely--and expressly calculated by Mahommed Gunga--to
bring the real man to the surface.  He had been no Cunningham unless
his sense of duty had been very near the surface--no Englishman, had
he not been proud that men of a foreign, conquered race should think
him worthy of all that honor;  and no man at all if his eye had been
quite dry when the veteran light-horseman swaggered out at last and
left him to his own reflections.

He had not been human if he had not felt a little homesick still,
although home to him had been a place where a man stayed with distant
relatives between the intervals of school.  He felt lonely, in spite of
his reception--a little like a baby on the edge of all things new and
wonderful.  He would have been no European if he had not felt the heat,
the hotel was like a vapor-bath.

But the leaping red blood of youth ran strong in him.  He had
imagination.  He could dream.  The good things he was tasting were a
presage only of the better things to come, and that is a wholesome
point of view.  He was proud--as who would not be?--to step
straight into the tracks of such a father;  and with that thought came
another--just as good for him, and for India, that made him feel as
though he were a robber yet, a thief in another's cornfield, gathering
what he did not sow.  It came over him in a flood that he must pay the
price of all this homage.

Some men pay in advance, some at the time, and some pay afterward.  All
men, he knew, must pay.  It would be his task soon to satisfy these
gentle-men, who took him at his face value, by proving to them that
they had made no very great mistake.  The thought thrilled him instead
of frightening--brought out every generous instinct that he had and
made him thank the God of All Good Soldiers that at least he would have
a chance to die in the attempt.  There was nothing much the matter with
young Cunningham.



CHAPTER VI


    I take no man at rumor's price,
            Nor as the gossips cry him.
    A son may ride, and stride, and stand;
            His father's eye--his father's hand--
    His father's tongue may give command;
            But ere I trust I'll try him!

BUT before young Cunningham was called upon to pay even a portion of
the price of fealty there was more of the receiving of it still in
store for him, and he found himself very hard put to it, indeed, to
keep overboiling spirits from becoming exultation of the type that
nauseates.

None of the other subalterns had influence, nor had they hereditary
anchors in the far northwest that would be likely to draw them on to
active service early in their career.  They had already been made to
surrender their boyhood dreams of quick promotion;  now, standing in
little groups and asking hesitating questions, they discovered that
their destination--Fort William--was about the least desirable of
all the awful holes in India.

They were told that a subaltern was lucky who could mount one step of
the promotion ladder in his first ten years;  that a major at fifty, a
colonel at sixty, and a general at seventy were quite the usual thing.
And they realized that the pay they would receive would be a mere
beggar's pittance in a neighborhood so expensive as Calcutta, and that
their little private means would be eaten up by the mere, necessities
of life.  They showed their chagrin and it was not very easy for young
Cunningham, watching Mahommed Gunga's lordly preparations for the long
up-country journey, to strike just the right attitude of pleasure at
the prospect without seeming to flaunt his better fortune.

Mahommed Gunga interlarded his hoarse orders to the mule-drivers with
descriptions in stateliest English, thrown out at random to the world
at large, of the glories of the manlier north--of the plains, where a
man might gallop while a horse could last, and of the mountains up
beyond the plains.  He sniffed at the fetid Bombay reek, and spoke of
the clean air sweeping from the snow-topped Himalayas, that put life
and courage into the lungs of men who rode like centaurs!  And the
other subalterns looked wistful, eying the bullock-carts that would
take their baggage by another route.

Fully the half of what Mahommed Gunga said was due to pride of race and
country.  But the rest was all deliberately calculated to rouse the
wicked envy of those who listened.  He meant to make the son of "Pukka"
Cunnigan feel, before he reached his heritage, that he was going up to
something worth his while.  To quote his own north-country metaphor, he
meant to "make the colt come up the bit."  He meant that "Chota"
Cunnigan should have a proper sense of his own importance, and should
chafe at restraint, to the end that when his chance did come to prove
himself he would jump at it.  Envy, he calculated--the unrighteous
envy of men less fortunately placed--would make a good beginning.
And it did, though hardly in the way he calculated.

Young Cunningham, tight-lipped to keep himself from grinning like a
child, determined to prove himself worthy of the better fortune;  and
Mahommed Gunga would have cursed into his black beard in disgust had he
known of the private resolutions being formed to obey orders to the
letter and obtain the good will of his seniors.  The one thing that the
grim old Rajput wished for his protege was jealousy!  He wanted him so
well hated by the "nabobs" who had grown crusty and incompetent in high
command that life for him in any northern garrison would be impossible.

Throughout the two months' journey to the north Mahommed Gunga never
left a stone unturned to make Cunningham believe himself much more than
ordinary clay.  All along the trunk road, that trails by many thousand
towns and listens to a hundred languages, whatever good there was was
Cunningham's.  Whichever room was best in each dak-bungalow, whichever
chicken the kansamah least desired to kill, whoever were the stoutest
dhoolee-bearers in the village, whichever horse had the easiest paces
--all were Cunningham's.  Respect were his, and homage and obeisance,
for the Rajput saw to it.

Of evenings, while they rested, but before the sun went down, the old
risaldar would come with his naked sabre and defy "Chota" Cunnigan to
try to touch him.  For five long weeks he tried each evening, the
Rajput never doing anything but parry,--changing his sabre often to
the other hand and grinning at the schoolboy swordsmanship--until one
evening, at the end of a more than usually hard-fought bout, the
youngster pricked him, lunged, and missed slitting his jugular by the
merest fraction of an inch.

"Ho!" laughed Mahommed Gunga later, as he sluiced out the cut while his
own adherents stood near by and chaffed him.  "The cub cuts his teeth,
then! Soon it will be time to try his pluck."

"Be gentle with him, risaldar-sahib;  a good cub dies as easily as a
poor one, until he knows the way."

"Leave him to me!  I will show him the way, and we will see what we
will see.  If he is to disgrace his father's memory and us, he shall do
it where there are few to see and none to talk of it.  When Alwa and
the others ask me, as they will ask, 'Is he a man?'  I will give them a
true answer!  I think he is a man, but I need to test him in all ways
possible before I pledge my word on it."

But after that little accident the old risaldar had sword-sticks
fashioned at a village near the road, and ran no more risks of being
killed by the stripling he would teach;  and before many more days of
the road had ribboned out, young Cunningham--bareback or from the
saddle--could beat him to the ground, and could hold his own on foot
afterward with either hand.

"The hand and eye are good!" said Mahommed Gunga. "It is time now for
another test."

So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for
four days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a
foul-mouthed fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads.  It was a
strangely chosen place to rest at.

Deep down in a hollow, where the trunk road took advantage of a winding
gorge between the hills--screened on nearly all sides by green jungle
whose brown edges wilted in the heat which the inner steam defied--
stuffy, smelly, comfortless, it stood like a last left rear-guard of a
white-man's city, swamped by the deathless, ceaselessly advancing tide
of green.  It was tucked between mammoth trees that had been left there
when the space for it was cleared a hundred years before, and that now
stood like grim giant guardians with arms out-stretched to hold the
verdure back.

The little tribe of camp-followers chased at least a dozen snakes out
of corners, and slew them in the open, as a preliminary to further
investigation.  There were kas-kas mats on the foursquare floors, and
each of these, when lifted, disclosed a swarm of scorpions that had to
be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in.  The once
white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased
one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin;  and there
was a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at
corruption and war to the death behind skirting boards and underneath
the floor.

It had evidently not been occupied for many years;  the kansamah looked
like a gray-bearded skeleton compressed within a tightened shroud of
parchment skin that shone where a coffin or a tomb had touched it.  He
seemed to have forgotten what the bungalow was for, or that a sahib
needed things to eat, until the ex-risaldar enlightened him, and then
he complained wheezily.

The stables--rather the patch-and-hole-covered desolation that once
had been stables--were altogether too snake-defiled and smelly to be
worth repairing;  the string of horses was quartered cleanly and snugly
under tents, and Mahommed Gunga went to enormous trouble in arranging a
ring of watch-fires at even distances.

"Are there thieves here, then?" asked Cunningham, and the Rajput nodded
but said nothing.  He seemed satisfied, though, that the man he had
brought safely thus far at so much trouble would be well enough housed
in the creaky wreck of the bungalow, and he took no precautions of any
kind as to guarding its approaches.

Cunningham watched the preparations for his supper with ill-concealed
disgust--saw the customary chase of a rubber-muscled chicken, heard
its death gurgles, saw the guts removed, to make sure that the kansamah
did not cook it with that part of its anatomy intact, as he surely
would do unless watched--and then strolled ahead a little way along
the road.

The fakir was squatting in the distance, on a big white stone, and in
the quiet of the gloaming Cunningham could hear his coarse, lewd voice
tossing crumbs of abuse and mockery to the seven or eight villagers who
squatted near him--half-amused, half-frightened, and altogether
credulous.

Even as he drew nearer Cunningham could not understand a word of what
the fakir said, but the pantomime was obvious.  His was the voice and
the manner of the professional beggar who has no more need to whine but
still would ingratiate.  It was the bullying, brazen swagger and the
voice that traffics in filth and impudence instead of wit;  and, in
payment for his evening bellyful he was pouring out abuse of Cunningham
that grew viler and yet viler as Cunningham came nearer and the fakir
realized that his subject could not understand a word of it.

The villagers looked leery and eyed Cunningham sideways at each fresh
sally.  The fakir grew bolder, until one of his listeners smothered an
open laugh in both hands and rolled over sideways.  Cunningham came
closer yet, half-enamoured of the weird scene, half-curious to discover
what the stone could be on which the fakir sat.

The fakir grew nervous.  Perhaps, after all, this was one of those
hatefully clever sahibs who know enough to pretend they do not know!
The abuse and vile innuendo changed to more obsequious, less obviously
filthy references to other things than Cunningham's religion, likes,
and pedigree, and the little crowd of men who had tacitly encouraged
him before got ready now to stand at a distance and take sides against
him should the white man turn out to have understood.

But Cunningham happened to catch sight of a cloud of paroquets that
swept in a screaming ellipse for a better branch to nest in and added
the one touch of gorgeous color needed to make the whole scene utterly
unearthly and unlike anything he had ever dreamed of, or had seen in
pictures, or had had  described to him.  He stood at gaze--forgetful
of the stone that had attracted him and of the fakir--spellbound by
the wonder-blend of hues branch-backed, and framed in gloom as the
birds' scream was framed in silence.

And, seeing him at gaze, the fakir recovered confidence and jeered new
ribaldry, until some one suddenly shot out from behind Cunningham, and
before he had recovered from his surprise he saw the fakir sprawling on
his back, howling for mercy, while Mahommed Gunga beat the blood out of
him with a whalebone riding-whip.

The sun went down with Indian suddenness and shut off the scene of
upraised lash and squirming, naked, ash-smeared devil, as a
magic-lantern picture;  disappears.  Only the creature's screams
reverberated through the jungle, like a belated echo to the restless
paroquets.

"He will sleep less easily for a week or two!" hazarded Mahommed Gunga,
stepping back toward Cunningham.  In the sudden darkness the white
breeches showed and the whites of his eyes, but little else;  his voice
growled like a rumble from the underworld.

"Why did you do it, risaldar?  What did he say?"

"It was enough, bahadur, that he sat on that stone;  for that alone he
had been beaten!  What he said was but the babbling of priests.  All
priests are alike.  They have a common jargon--a common disrespect
for what they dare not openly defy.  These temple rats of fakirs mimic
them.  That is all, sahib.  A whipping meets the case."

"But the stone?  Why shouldn't he sit on it?"

"Wait one minute, sahib, and then see."  He formed his hands into a
trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating
order to somebody behind:

"Oh-h-h--Battee-lao!"

The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man
came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.

Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still
sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him,
until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his
voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at
least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the
light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.

"Look, Cunningham-sahib!"

The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light,
to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side,
in curves, across the stone;  but it was too dark--the light was too
fitful;  the marks themselves were too faint from the constant
squatting of roadside wanderers.

Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant
took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig
hurriedly, scratching and scraping at what presently showed, even in
that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering.  Soon Cunningham
himself began to lend a hand.  He made out a date first, and he could
feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it.  Gradually,
letter by letter--word by word--he read it off, feeling a strange
new thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from
the haunted past.


    A.D. 1823. A.D.
    SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM
    WHO DIED ON THIS SPOT
    AETAT 81
    FROM
    WOUNDS INFLICTED BY A
    TIGER

There was no sound audible except the purring of the lamp flame and the
heavy breathing of the three as Cunningham gazed down at the very
crudely carved, stained, often-desecrated slab below which lay the
first of the Anglo-Indian Cunninghams.

This man--these crumbled bones that lay under a forgotten piece of
rock--had made all of their share of history.  They had begotten 
"Pukka" Cunningham, who had hacked the name deeper yet in the
crisscrossed annals of a land of war.  It was strange--it was queer
--uncanny--for the third of the Cunninghams to be sitting on the
stone.  It was unexpected, yet it seemed to have a place in the scheme
of things, for he caught himself searching his memory backward.

He received an impression that something was expected of him.  He knew,
by instinct and reasoning he could not have explained, that neither
Mahommed Gunga nor the other men would say a word until he spoke.  They
were waiting--he knew they were--for a word, or a sign, or an order
(he did not know which), on which would hang the future of all three of
them.

Yet there was no hurry--no earthly hurry.  He felt sure of it.  In
the silence and the blackness--in the tense, steamy atmosphere of
expectancy--he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that
there was superstition to be reckoned with--and that is something
which a white man finds hard to weigh and cope with, as a rule.

The sweat ran down his face in little streams a the prickly heat began
to move across his skin, like a fiery-footed centiped beneath his
undershirt, but he noticed, neither.  He began to be unconscious
anything except the knowledge that the bones of his grandsire lay
underneath him and that Mahommed Gunga waited for the word that would
fit into the scheme and solve a problem.

"Are there any tigers here now?" he asked presently, in a perfectly
normal voice.  He spoke as he had done when his servant asked him which
suit he would wear.

"Ha, sahib!  Many."

"Man-eaters, by any chance?"

Mahommed Gunga and the other man exchanged quick glances, but
Cunningham did not look up.  He did not see the quick-flashed whites as
their eyes met and looked down again.

"There is one, sahib--so say the kansamah and the head man--a
full-grown tiger, in his prime."

"I will shoot him."  Four words, said quietly--not "Do you think," or
"I would like to," or "Perhaps."  They were perfectly definite and
without a trace of excitement;  yet this man had never seen a tiger.

"Very good, sahib."  That, too, was spoken in a level voice, but
Mahommed Gunga's eyes and the other man's met once again above his
head.

"We will stay here four days;  by the third day there will be time
enough to have brought an elephant and--"

"I will go on foot," said Cunningham, quite quietly.  "Tomorrow, at
dawn, risaldar-sahib.  Will you be good enough to make arrangements?
All we need to know is where he is and how to get there--will you
attend to that?"

"Ha, sahib."

"Thanks.  I wonder if my supper's ready."

He turned and walked away, with a little salute-like movement of his
hand that was reminiscent of his father.  The two Rajputs watched him
in heavy-breathing silence until the little group of lights, where the
horse-tents faced the old dak-bungalow, swallowed him.  Then:

"He is good.  He will do!" said the black-beard who had brought the
lamp.

"He is good.  But many sahibs would have acted coolly, thus.  There
must be a greater test.  There must be no doubt--no littlest doubt.
Alwa and the others will ask me on my honor, and I will answer on my
honor, yes or no."

It was an hour before the two of them returned, and looked the horses
over and strolled up to bid Cunningham good night;  and in the
meanwhile they had seen about the morrow's tiger, and another matter.




CHAPTER VII


    What found ye, then? Why heated ye the pot?
            What useful metal down the channels ran?
    Gold?  Steel for making weapons?  Iron?  What?
            Nay. Out from the fire we kindled strode a man!

THEY set the legs of Cunningham's string-woven bed into pans of water,
to keep the scorpions and ants and snakes at bay, and then left him in
pitch darkness to his own devices, with a parting admonition to keep
his slippers on for the floor, in the dark, would be the prowling-place
of venomed death.

It was he who set the lamp on the little table by his bedside, for his
servant--for the first time on that journey--was not at hand to
execute his thoughts almost before he had spoken them.  Mahommed Gunga
had explained that the man was sick;  and that seemed strange, for he
had been well enough, and more than usually efficient, but an hour
before.

But there were stranger things and far more irritating ones to
interfere with the peaceful passage of the night.  There were sounds
that were unaccountable;  there was the memory of the wayside tombstone
and the train of thought that it engendered.  Added to the hell-hot,
baking stuffiness that radiated from the walls, there came the
squeaking of a punka rope pulled out of time--the piece of piping in
the mud-brick wall through which the rope passed had become clogged and
rusted, and the villager pressed into service had forgotten how to
pull;  he jerked at the cord between nods as the heat of the veranda
and the unaccustomed night duty combined to make him sleepy.

Soon the squeaking became intolerable, and Cunningham swore at him--
in English, because he spoke little of any native language yet, and had
not the least idea in any case what the punka-wallah's tongue might be.
For a while after that the pulling was more even;  he lay on one
elbow, letting the swinging mat fan just miss his ear, and examining
his rifle and pistols for lack of anything better to keep him from
going mad.  Then, suddenly, the pulling ceased altogether.  Silence and
hell heat shut down on him like a coffin lid.  Even the lamp flame
close beside him seemed to grow dim;  the weight of black night that
was suffocating him seemed to crush light out of the flame as well.

No living mortal could endure that, he imagined.  He swore aloud, but
there was no answer, so he got up, after crashing his rifle-butt down
on the floor to scare away anything that crawled.  For a moment he
stood, undecided whether to take the lamp or rifle with him--then
decided on the rifle, for the lamp might blow out in some unexpected
night gust, whereas if he left it where it was it would go on burning
and show him the way back to bed again.  Besides, he was too
unaccustomed to the joy of owning the last new thing in sporting rifles
to hesitate for long about what to keep within his grasp.

Through the open door he could see nothing but pitch-blackness,
unpunctuated even by a single star.  There were no lights where the
tents stood, so he judged that even the accustomed natives had found
the added heat of Mahommed Gunga's watch-fires intolerable and had
raked them out;  but from where he imagined that the village must be
came the dum-tu-dum-tu-dum of tom-toms, like fever blood pulsating in
the veins of devils of the night.

The punka-wallah slept.  He could just make out the man's blurred shape
--a shadow in the shadows--dog-curled, with the punkah rope looped
round his foot.  He kicked him gently, and the man stirred, but fell
asleep again.  He kicked him harder.  The man sat up and stared,
terrified;  the whites of his eyes were distinctly visible.  He seemed
to have forgotten why he was there, and to imagine that he saw a ghost.

Cunningham spoke to him--he first words that came into his head.

"Go on pulling," he said in English, quite kindly.

But if he had loosed his rifle off, the effect could not have been more
instantaneous.  Clutching his twisted rag of a turban in one hand, and
kicking his leg free, he ran for it--leaped the veranda rail, and
vanished--a night shadow, swallowed by its mother night.

"Come back!" called Cunningham.  "Iderao!  I won't hurt you!"

But there was no answer, save the tom-toms' thunder, swelling now into
a devil's chorus-coming nearer.  It seemed to be coming from the
forest, but he reasoned that it could not be;  it must be some village
marriage feast, or perhaps an orgy;  he had paid out what would seem to
the villagers a lot of money, and it might be that they were
celebrating the occasion.  It was strange, though, that he could see no
lights where the village ought to be.

For a moment he had a half-formed intention to shout for Mahommed
Gunga;  but he checked that, reasoning that the Rajput might think he
was afraid.  Then his eye caught sight of something blacker than the
shadows--something long and thin and creepy that moved, and he
remembered that bed, where the pans of water would protect him, was the
only safe place.

So he returned into the hot, black silence where the tiny lamp-flame
guttered and threw shadows.  He wondered why it guttered.  It seemed to
be actually short of air.  There were four rooms, he remembered, to the
bungalow, all connected and each opening outward by a door that faced
one of the four sides; he wondered whether the outer doors were opened
to admit a draught, and started to investigate.

Two of them were shut tight, and he could not kick them open;  the
dried-out teak and the heavy iron bolts held as though they had been
built to resist a siege;  the noise that he made as he rattled at them
frightened a swarm of unseen things--unguessed-at shapes--that
scurried away.  He thought he could see beady little eyes that looked
and disappeared and circled round and stopped to look again.  He could
hear creepy movements in the stillness.  It seemed better to leave
those doors alone.

One other door, which faced that of his own room, was open wide, and he
could feel the forest through it;  there was nothing to be seen, but
the stillness moved.  The velvet blackness was deeper by a shade, and
the heat, uprising to get even with the sky, bore up a stench with it.
There was no draught, no movement except upward.  Earth was panting-in
time, it seemed, to the hellish thunder of the tom-toms.

He went back and lay on the bed again, leaning the rifle against the
cot-frame, and trying by sheer will-power to prevent the blood from
bursting his veins.  He realized before long that he was parched with
thirst, and reached out for the water-jar that stood beside the lamp;
but as he started to drink he realized that a crawling evil was
swimming round and round in rings in the water.  In a fit of horror he
threw the thing away and smashed it into a dozen fragments in a corner.
He saw a dozen rats, at least, scamper to drink before the water could
evaporate or filter through the floor;  and when they were gone there
was no half-drowned crawling thing either.  They had eaten it.

He clutched his rifle to him.  The barrel was hot, but the feel of it
gave him a sense of companionship.  And then, as he lay back on the bed
again, the lamp went out.  He groped for it and shook it.  There was no
oil.

Now, what had been hot horror turned to fear that passed all
understanding--to the hate that does not reason--to the cold sweat
breaking on the roasted skin.  Where the four walls had been there was
blackness of immeasurable space.  He could hear the thousand-footed
cannibals of night creep nearer--driven in toward him by the dinning
of the tom-toms.  He felt that his bed was up above a scrambling swarm
of black-legged things that fought.

He had no idea how long he lay stock-still, for fear of calling
attention to himself, and hated his servant and Mahommed Gunga and all
India.  Once--twice--he thought he heard another sound, almost like
the footfall of a man on the veranda near him.  Once he thought that a
man breathed within ten paces of him, and for a moment there was a
distinct sensation of not being alone.  He hoped it was true;  he could
deal with an assassin.  That would be something tangible to hate and
hit.  Manhood came to his assistance--the spirit of the soldier that
will bow to nothing that has shape;  but it died away again as the
creeping silence once more shut down on him.

And then the thunder of the tom-toms ceased.  Then even the venomed
crawlers that he knew were near him faded into nothing that really
mattered, compared to the greater, stealthy horror that he knew was
coming, born of the shuddersome, shut silence that ensued.  There was
neither air nor view--no sense of time or space--nothing but the
coal-black pit of terror yawning--cold sweat in the heat, and a
footfall--an undoubted footfall--followed by another one, too heavy
for a man's.

Where heavy feet were there was something tangible.  His veins tingled
and the cold sweat dried.  Excitement began to reawaken all his soldier
senses, and the wish to challenge seized him--the soldierly intent to
warn the unaware, which is the actual opposite of cowardice.

"Halt!  Who comes there?"

He lipped the words, but his dry throat would not voice them.  Before
he could clear his throat or wet his lips his eye caught something
lighter than the night--two things--ten--twelve paces off--two
things that glowed or sheened as though there were light inside them--
too big and too far apart to be owl's eyes, but singularly like them.
They moved, a little sideways and toward him;  and again he heard the
heavy, stealthy footfall.

They stayed still then for what may have been a minute, and another
sense--smell--warned him and stirred up the man in him.  He had
never smelled it in his life;  it must have been instinct that assured
him of an enemy behind the strange, unpleasant, rather musky reek that
filled the room.  His right hand brought the rifle to his shoulder
without sound, and almost without conscious effort on his part.

He forgot the heat now and the silence and discomfort.  He lay still on
his side, squinting down the rifle barrel at a spot he judged was
midway between a pair of eyes that glowed, and wondering where his
foresight might be.  It struck him all at once that it was quite
impossible to see the foresight--that he must actually touch what he
would hit if he would be at all sure of hitting it.  He remembered,
too, in that instant--as a born soldier does remember things--that
in the dark an attacking enemy is probably more frightened than his
foe.  His father had told it him when he was a little lad afraid of
bogies;  he in turn had told it to the other boys at school, and they
had passed it on until in that school it had become rule number one of
school-boy lore--just as rule number two in all schools where the
sons of soldiers go is "Take the fight to him."

He leaped from the bed, with his rifle out in front of him--
white-nightshirted and unexpected--sudden enough to scare the wits
out of anything that had them.  He was met by a snarl.  The two eyes
narrowed, and then blazed.  They lowered, as though their owner
gathered up his weight to spring.  He fired between them.  The flash
and the smoke blinded him;  the burst of the discharge within four
echoing walls deadened his cars, and he was aware of nothing but a
voice beside him that said quietly:  "Well done, bahadur!  Thou art thy
father's son!"

He dropped his rifle butt to the floor, and some one struck a light.
Even then it was thirty seconds before his strained eyes grew
accustomed to the flare and he could see the tiger at his feet, less
than a yard away--dead, bleeding, wide-eyed, obviously taken by
surprise and shot as he prepared to spring.  Beside him, within a yard,
Mahommed Gunga stood, with a drawn sabre in his right hand and a pistol
in his left, and there were three other men standing like statues by
the walls.

"How long have you been here?" demanded Cunningham.

"A half-hour, sahib."

"Why?"

"In case of need, sahib.  That tiger killed a woman yesterday at dawn
and was driven off his kill;  he was not likely to be an easy mark for
an untried hunter."

"Why did you enter without knocking?"

The ex-risaldar said nothing.

"I see that you have shoes on."

"The scorpions, sahib--"

"Would you be pleased, Mahommed Gunga, if I entered your house with my
hat on and without knocking or without permission?"

"Sahib, I--"

"Be good enough to have that brute's carcass dragged out and skinned,
and--ah--leave me to sleep, will you?"

Mahommed Gunga bowed, and growled an order;  another man passed the
order on, and the tom-tom thundering began again as a dozen villagers
pattered in to take away the tiger.

"Tell them, please," commanded Cunningham, "that that racket is to
cease.  I want to sleep."

Again Mahommed Gunga bowed, without a smile or a tremor on his face;
again a growled order was echoed and re-echoed through the dark.  The
drumming stopped.

"Is there oil in the bahadur's lamp?" asked Mahommed Gunga.

"Probably not," said Cunningham.

"I will command that--"

"You needn't trouble, thank you, risaldar-sahib.  I sleep better in the
dark.  I'll be glad to see you after breakfast as usual--ah--
without your shoes, unless you come in uniform. Good night."

The Rajput signed to the others and withdrew with dignity.  Cunningham
reloaded his rifle in the dark and lay down.  Within five minutes the
swinging of the punka and the squeaking of the rope resumed, but
regularly this time;  Mahommed Gunga had apparently unearthed a man who
understood the business.  Reaction, the intermittent coolth, as the mat
fan swung above his face, the steady, evenly timed squeak and movement
--not least, the calm of well-asserted dignity--all joined to have
one way, and Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur slept, to dream of fire-eyed tigers
dancing on tombstones laid on the roof of hell, and of a grandfather in
full general's uniform, who said:  "Well done, bahadur!"

But outside, by a remade camp-fire, Mahommed Gunga sat and chuckled to
himself, and every now and then grew eloquent to the bearded men who
sat beside him.

"Aie!  Did you hear him reprimand me?  By the beard of God's prophet,
that is a man of men!  So was his father!  Now I will tell Alwa and the
others that I bring a man to them!  By the teeth of God and my own
honor I will swear to it!  His first tiger--he had never seen a
tiger!--in the dark, and unexpected--caught by it, to all seeming,
like a trapped man in a cage--no lamp--no help at hand, or so he
thought until it was all over.  And he ran at the tiger!  And then,
'you come with your shoes on, Mahommed Gunga--why, forsooth?'  Did
you hear him?  By the blood of Allah, we have a man to lead us!"




CHAPTER VIII


    Now, the gist of the thing is--Be silent.  Be calm.
            Be awake.  Be on hand on the day.
    Be instant to heed the first note of alarm.
            And--precisely--exactly--Obey.

AT Howrah, while Mahommed Gunga was employing each chance circumstance
to test the pluck and decision and reliability of Cunningham at almost
every resting-place along the Grand Trunk Road, the armed squire he had
left behind with a little handful of gold mohurs and three horses was
finding time heavy on his hands.

Like his master, Ali Partab was a man of action, to whom the purlieus
of a caravansary were well enough on rare occasions.  He could ruffle
it with the best of them;  like any of his race, he could lounge with
dignity and listen to the tales that hum wherever many horsemen
congregate;  and he was no mean raconteur--he had a tale or two to
tell himself, of women and the chase and of the laugh that he, too, had
flung in the teeth of fear when opportunity arose.

But each new story of the paid taletellers, who squat and drone and
reach a climax, and then pass the begging bowl before they finish it--
each merrily related jest brought in by members of the constantly
arriving trading parties--each neigh of his three chargers--every
new phase of the kaleidoscopic life he watched stirred new ambition in
him to be up, and away, and doing.  Many a dozen times he had to remind
himself that "there had been a trust imposed."

He exercised the horses daily, riding each in turn until he was as lean
and lithe and hard beneath the skin as they were.  They were Mahommed
Gunga's horses--he Mahommed Gunga's man;  therefore, his honor was
involved.  He reasoned, when he took the trouble to, along the good
clean feudal line that lays down clearly what service is:  there is no
honor, says that argument, in serving any one who is content with half
a service, and the honor is the only thing that counts.

As day succeeded ever sultrier, ever longer-drawn-out day--as each
night came that saw him peg the horses out wherever what little breezes
moved might fan them--as he sat among the courtyard groups and
listened in the heavy heat, the fact grew more apparent to him that
this trust of his was something after all which a man of worth might
shoulder proudly.  There was danger in it.

The talk among the traders--darkly hinted, most of it, and couched in
metaphor--was all of blood, and what would follow on the letting of
it.  Now and then a loud-mouthed boaster would throw caution to the
winds and speak openly of a grim day coming for the British;  he would
be checked instantly by wiser men, but not before Ali Partab had heard
enough to add to his private store of information.

Priests came from a dozen cities to the eastward, all nominally after
pilgrims for the sacred places, but all strangely indifferent to their
quest.  They preferred, it would seem, to sit in rings with chance-met
ruffians--with believers and unbelievers alike--even with men of no
caste at all--and talk of other things than pilgrimages.

"Next year, one hundred years ago the English conquered India.
Remember ye the prophecy?  One hundred years they had!  This, then, is
the last year.  Whom the gods would whelm they first deprive of reason;
mark ye this!  The cartridges they serve out to the sepoys now are
smeared with the blended fat of cows and pigs.  Knowing that we Hindoos
hold the cow a sacred beast, they do this sacrilege--and why?  They
would make us bite the cartridges and lose our caste.  And why again?
Because they would make us Christians!  That is the truth!  Else why
are the Christian missionaries here in Howrah?"

The listeners would nod while the little red fires glowed and purred
above the pipes, and others not included in the circle strained forward
through the dark to listen.

"The gods get ready now!  Are ye ready?"

Elsewhere, a hadji--green-turbaned from the pilgrimage to Mecca--
would hold out to a throng of true believers.

"Ay!  Pig's fat on the cartridges!  The new drill is that the sepoy
bites the cartridge first, to spill a little powder and make priming.
Which true believer wishes to defile himself with pig's fat?  Why do
they this?  Why are the Christian missionaries here?  Ask both riddles
with one breath, for both two are one!"

"Slay, then!"

"Up now, and slay!"

There would be an instant, eager restlessness, while Ali Partab would
glance over to where the horses stood, and would wonder why the word
that loosed him was so long in coming.  The hadji would calm his
listeners and tell them to get ready, but be still and await the sign.

"There were to be one hundred years, ran the prophecy;  but ninety-nine
and a portion have yet run.  Wait for the hour!"

Then, for perhaps the hundredth time, Ali Partab would pretend that
movement alone could save one or other of his horses from heat
apoplexy.  He would mount, and ride at a walking pace through the
streets that seemed like a night view of a stricken battle-field, turn
down by the palace wall, and then canter to the schoolhouse, where the
hag--wiser than her mistress--would be sleeping in the open.

"Thou!  Mother of a murrain!  Toothless one!  Is there no word yet?"

The hag would leer up through the heavy darkness--make certain that
he had no lance with him with which to prod her in the ribs--scratch
herself a time or two like a stray dog half awakened--and then leer
knowingly.

"Hast thou the gold mohurs?" she would demand.

"Am I a sieve?"

"Let my old eyes see them, sahib."

He would take out two gold coins and hold them out in such a way that
she could look at them without the opportunity to snatch.

"There is no word yet," she would answer, when her eyes had feasted on
them as long as his patience would allow.

"Have they no fear then?"

"None. Only madness!"

"See that they bite thee not!  Keep thy wits with thee, and be ready to
bring me word in time, else--"

"Patience, sahib!  Show me the coins again--one little look--again
once!"

But Ali Partab would wheel and ride away, leaving her to mumble and
gibber in the road and curl again on to her blanket in the blackest
corner by the door.

Once, on an expedition of that kind, he encountered Duncan McClean
himself.  The lean, tall Scotsman, gray-headed from the cares he had
taken on himself, a little bowed from heat and hopelessness, but
showing no least symptom of surrender in the kind, strong lines of a
rugged face, stood, eyes upward, in the moonlight.  The moon, at least,
looked cool.  It was at the full, like a disk of silver, and he seemed
to drink in the beams that bathed him.

"Does he worship it?" wondered Ali Partab, reining from an amble to a
walk and watching half-reverently.  The followers of Mohammed are most
superstitious about the moon.  The feeling that he had for this man of
peace who could so gaze up at it was something very like respect, and,
with the twenty-second sense that soldiers have, he knew, without a
word spoken or a deed seen done, that this would be a wielder of cold
steel to be reckoned should he ever slough the robes of peace and take
it into his silvered head to fight.  The Rajput, that respects decision
above all other virtues, perhaps because it is the one that he most
lacks, could sense firm, unshakable, quick-seized determination on the
instant.

Duncan McClean acknowledged the fierce-seeming stare with a salute, and
Ali Partab dismounted instantly.  He who holds a trust from such as
Mahommed Gunga is polite in recognition of the trust.  He leaned, then,
against the horse's withers, wondering how far he ought to let
politeness go and whether his honor bade him show contempt for the
Christian's creed.

"Is there any way, I wonder," asked the Scotsman, the clean-clipped
suspicion of Scots dialect betraying itself even through the
Hindustanee that he used, "of getting letters through to some small
station?"

"I know not," said the Rajput.

"You are a Mohammedan?"  The Scotsman peered at him, adjusting his
viewpoint to the moon's rays.  "I see you are.  A Rajput, too, I think."

"Ha, sahib."

"There was a Rangar here not very long ago."  This man evidently knew
the proper title to give a he true believer of the proudest race there
is.  Ali Partab's heart began to go out to him--"an officer, I think,
once of the Rajput Horse, who very kindly carried letters for me.
Perhaps you know of some other gentleman of your race about to travel
northward?  He could earn, at least, gratitude."

"So-ho!" thought Ali Partab to himself. "I have known men of his race
who would have offered money, to be spat on!--Not now, sahib,"  he
answered aloud.

"Mahommed Gunga was the officer's name.  Do you know him, or know of
him, by any chance?"

"Ha, sahib, I know him well.  It is an honor."

The Scotsman smiled.  "He must be very far away by this time.  How
many are there, I wonder, in India who have such things said of them
when their backs are turned?"

"More than a few, sahib!  I would draw steel for the good name of more
than a hundred men whom I know, and there be many others!"

"Men of your own race?"

"And yours, sahib."

There was no bombast in the man's voice;  it was said good-naturedly,
as a man might say, "There are some friends to whom I would lend
money."  No man with any insight could mistake the truth that underlay
the boast.  The Scotsman bowed.

"I am glad, indeed, to have met you.  Will you sit down a little while?"

"Nay, sahib.  The hour is late.  I was but keeping the blood moving in
this horse of mine."

"Well, tell me, since you won't stay, have you any notion who the man
was whom Mahommed Gunga sent to get my letters?  My daughter handed
them to him one evening, late, at this door."

"I am he, sahib."

"Then--I understood--perhaps I was mistaken--I thought it was his
man who came?"

"Praised be Allah, I am his man, sahib!"

"Oh!  I wonder whether my servants praise God for the privilege!"
McClean made the remark only half-aloud and in English.  Ali Partab
could not have understood the words, but he may have caught their
meaning, for he glanced sideways at the old hag mumbling in the shadow
and grinned into his beard.  "Are you in communication with him?  Could
you get a letter to him?"

"I have no slightest notion where he is, sahib."

"If my letters could once reach him, wherever he might be, I would feel
confident of their arriving at their destination."

"I, too, sahib!"

"I sent one letter--to a government official.  It cannot have reached
him, for there should have been an answer and none has come.  It had
reference to this terrible suttee business.  Suttee is against the law
as well as against all dictates of reason and humanity;  yet the
Hindoos make a constant practice of it here under our very eyes.  These
native states are under treaty to observe the law.  I intend to do all
in my power to put a stop to their ghoulish practices, and Maharajah
Howrah knows what my intentions are.  It must be a Mohammedan, this
time, to whom I intrust my correspondence on suttee!"

Now, a Rangar is a man whose ancestors were Hindoos but who became
converts to Islam.  Like all proselytes, they adhere more
enthusiastically to their religion than do the men whose mother creed
it is;  and the fact that the Rangars originally became converts under
duress is often thrown in their teeth by the Hindoos, who gain nothing
in the way of brotherly regard in the process.  A Rangar hates a Hindoo
as enthusiastically as he loves a fight.  Ali Partab began to drum his
fingers on his teeth and to exhibit less impatience to be off.

"There is no knowing, sahib.  I, too, am no advocate of superstitious
practices involving cruelty.  I might get a letter through.  My
commission from the risaldar-sahib would include all honorable matters
not obstructive to the main issue.  I have certain funds--"

"I, too, have funds," smiled the missionary.

"I am not allowed, sahib, to involve myself in any brawl until after my
business is accomplished.  It would be necessary first to assure me on
that point.  My honor is involved in that matter.  To whom, and of what
nature, would the letter be?"

"A letter to the Company's Resident at Abu, reporting to him that
Hindoo widows are still compelled in this city to burn themselves to
death above their husbands' funeral pyres."

The Rajput grinned.  "Does the Resident sahib not know it, then?"

"There will be no chance of his not knowing should my report reach him!"

"I will see, sahib, what can be done, then, in the matter.  If I can
find a man, I will bring him to you."

The missionary thanked him and stood watching as the Rajput rode away.
When the horseman's free, lean back had vanished in the inky darkness
his eyes wandered over to a point where tongues of flame licked upward,
casting a dull, dancing, crimson glow on the hot sky.  Here and there,
silhouetted in the firelight, he could see the pugrees and occasional
long poles of men who prodded at the embers.  Ululating through the din
of tom-toms he could catch the wails of women.  He shuddered, prayed a
little, and went in.

That day even the little bazaar fosterlings, whom he had begged, and
coaxed, and taught, had all deserted to be present at the burning of
three widows.  Even the lepers in the tiny hospital that he had started
had limped out for a distant view.  He had watched a year's work all
disintegrating in a minute at the call of bestial, loathsome,
blood-hungry superstition.

And he was a man of iron, as Christian missionaries go.  He had been
hard-bitten in his youth and trained in a hard, grim school.  In the
Isle of Skye he had seen the little cabin where his mother lived pulled
down to make more room for a fifty-thousand-acre deer-forest.  He had
seen his mother beg.

He had worked his way to Edinburgh, toiled at starvation wages for the
sake of leave to learn at night, burned midnight oil, and failed at the
end of it, through ill health, to pass for his degree.

He had loved as only hard-hammered men can love, and had married after
a struggle the very thought of which would have melted the courage of
an ordinary man, only to see his wife die when her child was born.  And
even then, in that awful hour, he had not felt the utterness of misery
such as came to him when he saw that his work in Howrah was undone.  He
had given of his best, and all his best, and it seemed that he had
given it for nothing.

"Who was that man, father?" asked a very weary voice through which
courage seemed to live yet, as the tiniest suspicion of a sweet refrain
still lives through melancholy bars.

"The man who took your home letters to Mahommed Gunga."

"And--?"

"He has promised to try to find a man for me who will take my report on
this awful business to the Resident at Abu."

"Father, listen!  Listen, please!" Rosemary McClean drew a chair for
him and knelt beside him.  Youth saved her face from being drawn as
his, but the heat and horror had begun to undermine youth's powers of
resistance.  She looked more beautiful than ever, but no law lays down
that a wraith shall be unlovely.  She had tried the personal appeal
with him a hundred times, and argument a thousand;  now, she used both
in a concentrated, earnest effort to prevail over his stubborn will.
Her will was as strong as his, and yielded place to nothing but her
sense of loyalty.  There were not only Rajputs, as the Rajputs knew,
who could be true to a high ideal.  "I am sure that whoever that man is
he must be the link between us and the safety Mahommed Gunga spoke of.
Otherwise, why does he stay behind?  Native officers who have servants
take their servants with them, as a rule."

"Well?"

"Give the word!  Let us at least get in touch with safety!"

"For myself, no.  For you, yes!  I have been weak with you, dear.  I
have let my selfish pleasure in having you near me overcome my sense of
duty--that, and my faithless fear that you would not be properly
provided for.  I think, too, that I have never quite induced myself to
trust natives sufficiently--even native gentlemen.  You shall go,
Rosemary.  You shall go as soon as I can get word to Mahommed Gunga's
man. Call that old woman in."

"Father, I will not go without you, and you know it!  My place is with
you, and I have quite made up my mind.  If you stay, I stay!  My
presence here has saved your life a hundred times over.  No, I don't
mean just when you were ill;  I mean that they dare not lay a finger on
me!  They know that a nation which respects their women would strike
hard and swiftly to avenge a woman of its own!  If I were to go away
and leave you they would poison you or stab you within a day, and then
hold a mock trial and hang some innocent or other to blind the British
Government. I would be a murderess if I left you here alone!  Come!
Come away!"

He shook his head.  "It was wrong of me to ever bring you here," he
said sadly.  "But I did not know--I would never have believed."  Then
wrath took hold of him--the awful, cold anger of the Puritan that
hates evil as a concrete thing, to be ripped apart with steel.  "God's
wrath shall burst on Howrah!" he declared.  "Sodom and Gomorrah were no
worse!  Remember what befell them!"

"Remember Lot!" said Rosemary.  "Come away!"

"Lot stayed on to the last, and tried to warn them!  I will warn the
Resident!  Here, give me my writing things--where are they?"

He pushed her aside, none too gently, for the fire of a Covenanter's
anger was blazing in his eyes.

"There are forty thousand British soldiers standing still, and wrong--
black, shameful wrong--is being done!  For a matter of gold--for
fear of the cost in filthy lucre--they refrain from hurling
wrong-doers in the dust!  For the sake of dishonorable peace they leave
these native states to misgovern themselves and stink to high heaven!
Will God allow what they do?  The shame and the sin is on England's
head!  Her statesmen shut their eyes and cry 'Peace, peace!' where
there is no peace.  Her queen sits idle on the throne while widows
burn, screaming, in the flames of superstitious priests.  Men tell her,
'All is well;  there is British rule in India!'  They are too busy
robbing widows in the Isle of Skye to lend an ear to the cries of
India's widows!  Corruption--superstition--murder--lies--black
wrong--black selfishness--all growing rank beneath the shadow of
the British rule--how long will God let that last?"

He was pacing up and down like a caged lion, not looking at Rosemary,
not speaking to her--speaking to himself, and giving rein to all the
rankling rage at wrong that wrong had nurtured in him since his
boyhood.  She knelt still by the chair, her eyes following him as he
raged up and down the matted floor.  She pitied him more than she did
India.

When he took the one lamp at last and set it where the light would fall
above his writing pad, she left the room and went to stand at the
street-door, where the sluggish night air was a degree less stifling
than in the mud-plastered, low-ceilinged room.  As she stood there, one
hand on either door-post to remind her she was living in a concrete
world, not a charred whisp swaying in the heat, a black thing rose out
of the blackness, and the toothless hag held out a bony hand and
touched her.

"Is it not time yet for the word to go?" she asked.

"No.  No word yet, Joanna."




CHAPTER IX


    Now, God give good going to master o' mine,
            God speed him, and lead him, and nerve him;
    God give him a lead of a length in the line,
            And,--God let him boast that I serve him!

THE dawn was barely breaking yet when things stirred in the little
mission house.  The flea-bitten gray pony was saddled by a sleepy
saice, and brought round from his open-sided thatch stable in the rear.
The violet and mauve, that precede the aching yellow glare of day were
fading; a coppersmith began his everlasting bong-bong-bong, apparently
reverberating from every direction;  the last, almost indetectable,
warm whiff of night wind moved and died away, and the monkeys in the
near-by baobab chattered it a requiem.  Almost on the stroke of sunrise
Rosemary McClean stepped out--settled her sun-helmet, with a moue
above the chin-strap that was wasted on flat-bosomed, black
grandmotherdom and sulky groom--and mounted.

She needed no help.  The pony stood as though he knew that the hot wind
would soon dry the life out of him;  and, though dark rings beneath
dark eyes betrayed the work of heat and sleepless worry on a girl who
should have graced the cool, sweet, rain-swept hills of Scotland, she
had spirit left yet and an unspent store of youth.  The saice seemed
more weathered than the twenty-year-old girl, for he limped back into
the smelly shelter of the servants' quarters to cook his breakfast and
mumble about dogs and sahibs who prefer the sun.

She looked shrunk inside the riding-habit--not shrivelled, for she
sat too straight, but as though the cotton jacket had been made for a
larger woman.  If she seemed tired, and if a stranger might have
guessed that her head ached until the chestnut curls were too heavy for
it, she was still supple.  And, as she whipped the pony into an
unwilling trot and old mission-named Joanna broke into a jog behind,
revolt--no longer impatience, or discontent, or sorrow, but reckless
rebellion--rode with her.

It was there, plain for the world to see, in the firm lines of a little
Puritan mouth, in the angle of a high-held chin in the set of a gallant
little pair of shoulders.  The pony felt it, and leaned forward to a
canter.  Joanna scented, smelt, or sensed in some manner known to
Eastern old age, that purpose was afoot;  this was to be no
early-morning canter, merely out and home again;  there was no time,
now, for the customary tricks of corner-cutting and rest-snatching
under eaves;  she tucked her head down and jogged forward in the dust,
more like a dog than ever.  It was a dog's silent, striving
determination to be there when the finish came--a dog's disregard of
all object or objective but his master's--but a long-thrown stride,
and a crafty, beady eye that promised more usefulness than a dog's when
called on.

The first word spoken was when Rosemary drew rein a little more than
half-way along the palace wall.

"Are you tired yet, Joanna?"

"Uh-uh!" the woman answered, shaking her head violently and pointing
at the sun that mounted every minute higher.  The argument was obvious;
in less than twenty minutes the whole horizon would be shimmering
again like shaken plates of brass;  wherever the other end might be, a
rest would be better there than here!  Her mistress nodded, and rode on
again, faster yet;  she had learned long ago that Joanna could show a
dusty pair of heels to almost anything that ran, and she had never yet
known distance tire her;  it had been the thought of distance and speed
combined that made her pause and ask.

She did not stop again until they had cantered up through the awakening
bazaar, where unclean-looking merchants and their underlings rinsed out
their teeth noisily above the gutters, and the pariah dogs had started
nosing in among the muck for things unthinkable to eat.  The sun had
shortened up the shadows and begun to beat down through the gaps;  the
advance-guard of the shrivelling hot wind had raised foul dust eddies,
and the city was ahum when she halted at last beside the big brick arch
of the caravansary, where Mahommed Gunga's boots and spurs had caught
her eye once.

"Now, Joanna!"  She leaned back from the saddle and spoke low, but with
a certain thrill.  "Go in there, find me Mahommed Gunga-sahib's man,
and bring him out here!"

"And if he will not come?"  The old woman seemed half-afraid to enter.

"Go in, and don't come out without him--unless you want to see me go
in by myself!"

The old woman looked at her piercingly with eyes that gleamed from amid
a bunch of wrinkles, then motioned with a skinny arm in the direction
of an awning where shade was to be had from the dangerous early
sun-rays.  She made no move to enter through the arch until her
mistress had taken shelter.

Fifteen minutes later she emerged with Ali Partab, who looked sleepy,
but still more ashamed of his unmilitary dishabille.  Rosemary McClean
glanced left and right--forgot about the awning and the custom which
decrees aloofness--ignored the old woman's waving arm and Ali
Partab's frown, and rode toward him eagerly.

"Did Mahommed Gunga-sahib leave you here with any orders relative to
me?" she asked.

The Rajput bowed.

"Before he went away, he spoke to me of safety, and told me he would
leave a link between me and men whom I may trust."

The Rajput bowed again.  Neither of them saw an elbow laid on the
window-ledge of a room above the arch;  it disappeared, and very
gingerly a bared black head replaced it.  Then the head too disappeared.

The girl's eyes sparkled as the reassurance came that at least one good
fighting man was waiting to do nothing but assist her.  For the moment
she threw caution to the winds and remembered nothing but her plight
and her father's stubbornness.

"My father will not come away, but--"

Ali Partab's eyes betrayed no trace of concern.

"But--I thought--Are you all alone?"

"All alone, Miss-sahib, but your servant."

"Oh!  I thought--perhaps that"--she checked herself, then rushed
the words out as though ashamed of them--"that, if you had men to
help you, you might carry him away against his will!  Where are these
others who are to be trusted?"

Ali Partab grinned and then drew himself up with a movement of polite
dissent.  It was not for him to question the suggestions of a
Miss-sahib;  he conveyed that much with an inimitable air.  But it was
his business to keep strictly to the letter of his orders.

"Miss-sahib, I cannot do that.  So said Mahommed Gunga:  'When the hag
brings word, then take three horses and bear the Miss-sahib and her
father to my cousin Alwa's place.'  I stand ready to obey, but the
padre-sahib comes not against his will."

"To whose place?"

"Alwa's, Miss-sahib."

"And who is he?"  She seemed bewildered.  "I had hoped to be escorted
to some British residency."

"That would be for Alwa, should he see fit.  He has men and horses, and
a fort that is impregnable.  The Miss-sahib would be safe there under
all circumstances."

"But--but, supposing I declined to accept that invitation?  Supposing
I preferred not to be carried off to a--er--a Mohammedan
gentleman's fort.  What then?"

"I could but wait here, Miss-sahib, until the hour came when you
changed your mind, or until Mahommed Gunga by letter or by word of
mouth relieved me of my trust."

"Oh!  Then you will wait here until I ask?"

"Surely, Miss-sahib."

The head again peered through the window up above them, but disappeared
below the ledge furtively, and none of the three were aware of it.  For
that matter, the old woman was gazing intently at Ali Partab and
listening eagerly;  he stood almost underneath the arch, and Miss
McClean was staring at him frowning with the effort to translate her
thoughts into a language that is very far from easy.  They would none
of them have seen the roof descending on them.

"And--and won't you under any circumstances take us, say, to the
Resident at Abu instead?"

"I may not, Miss-sahib."

"But why?"

"Of a truth I know not.  I never yet knew Mahommed Gunga to give an
order without good reason for it;  but beyond that he chose me, because
he said the task might prove difficult and he trusted me, I know
nothing."

"Have you no idea of the reason?"

"Miss-sahib, I am a soldier. To me an order is an order to be carried
out;  suspicions, fears are nothing unless they stand in the way of
accomplishment.  I await your word. I am ready. The horses are here--
good horses--lean and hard.  The order is that you must ask me."

"Thank you--er--Ali what?--thank you, Ali Partab." The
disappointment in her voice was scarcely more noticeable than the
despondency her drooping figure showed.  The little shoulders that had
sat so square and gallantly seemed to have lost their strength, and
there was none of the determined ring left in the words she hesitated
for.  "I--hope you will understand that I am grateful--but--I
cannot--er--see my way just yet to--"

"In your good time, Miss-sahib.  I was ordered to have patience!"

"At least I will have more confidence, knowing that you are always
close at hand."

The Rajput bowed.  She reined back.  He saluted, and she bowed again;
then, with a glance to make sure that Joanna followed, she started back
at little more than a walking pace--a dejected wraith of a girl on a
dejected-looking pony, too overcome by the upsetting of her rebellious
scheme to care or even think whether Joanna dropped out of sight or
not.  Ali Partab watched her down the street with a face that betrayed
no emotion and no suspicion of what his thoughts might be.  When she
was out of sight he went back under the arch to attend to his three
horses;  and the moment that he did so a fat but very furtive Hindoo
took his place--glanced down the street once in the direction that
Rosemary had taken--and then darted up-street as fast as his shaking
paunch would let him.  He had been gone at the least ten minutes, when
Joanna, also furtive, also in a hurry, dodged here and there among the
commencing surge of traffic and approached the arch again.

It would be useless to try to read her mind, or to translate the
glitter of her beady eyes into thoughts intel