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Rung Ho! A Novel

by Talbot Mundy · English · Gutenberg #5153 · 503,614 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rung Ho! A Novel

Author: Talbot Mundy


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #5153]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5153

Credits: Produced by M.R.J., and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNG HO! A NOVEL ***




Produced by M.R.J.







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. T
 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 intelligible to any but an Oriental.
It was quite clear, though, that she wished not to be noticed, that she
feared the occupants of the caravansary, and that she had returned for
word with Ali Partab. He, least of all, would have doubted her intention
of demanding the two gold mohurs, for it was she who had brought the
word that Miss McClean wanted him. But what relation that intention
had to her loyalty or treachery, or whether she were capable of
either--capable of anything except greed, and obedience for the sake of
pay--were problems no man living could have guessed.

She asked the lounging sweeper by the arch whether Ali Partab had ridden
out as yet. He jeered back outrageous improprieties, suggestive of
impossible ambition on the hag's part. She called him “sahib,” dubbed
him “father of a dozen stalwart sons,” returned a few of his immodest
compliments with a flattering laugh, and learned that Ali Partab was
still busy in the caravansary. Then she proceeded to make herself
very inconspicuous beside a two-wheeled wagon, up-ended in the gutter
opposite the arch, and waited with eastern patience for the horseman to
ride out.

She saw the fat Hindoo come back, in no particular hurry now, and seat
himself not far from her. Later she saw eight horsemen ride down the
street, pass the arch, wheel, and halt. She noticed that they were
not Maharajah Howrah's men but a portion of his brother Jaimihr's
body-guard, then took no further notice of them. If they chose to wait
there, it was no affair of hers, and to appear inquisitive would be to
invite a lance-butt, very shrewdly thrust where it would hurt.

It was an hour at least before Ali Partab rode out through the arch,
looking down anxiously at his horse's off-hind that had been showing
symptoms of “brushing” lately. Joanna rose instantly to cross the street
and intercept him; and she recoiled in the nick of time to save herself
from being ridden down.

At a sign from the fat Hindoo the eight horsemen spurred, and swooped
up-street with the speed and certainty of sparrow-hawks and the noise of
devastation. They rode down Ali Partab--unhorsed him--bound him--threw
him on his horse again--and galloped off before any but the Hindoo had
time to realize that he was their objective. He was gone--snatched
like a chicken from the coop. Noise and dust were all the trace or
explanation that he left. The mazy streets swallowed him; the Hindoo
waddled over to the arch and disappeared without a smile on his face to
show even interest. The interrupted trading and bartering went on again,
and no one commented or made a move to follow but Joanna.

She watched the fat Hindoo, and made sure that she would recognize him
anywhere again. Then, by a trail that no one would have guessed at and
few could have followed, she made her way to Jaimihr's palace--three
miles away from Howrah's--where a dozen sulky-looking sepoys lolled,
dismounted, by the wooden gate. There was neither sight nor sound of
mounted men, and the gate was shut; but in the middle of the roadway
there was smoking dung, and there was a suspicion of overacting about
the indifference of the guardians of the entrance.

There was no overacting, though, in what Joanna did. Nobody would have
dreamed that she was playing any kind of part, or interested in anything
at all except the coppers that she begged for. She squatted in
the roadway, ink-black and clear-cut in the now blazing sunlight,
alternately flattering them and pretending to a knowledge of
unguessed-at witchcraft.

She was there still at midday when they changed the guard. She was
there when night fell, still squatting in the roadway, still exchanging
repartee and hints at the supernatural with armed men who shuddered now
and then between their bursts of mockery. The sore, suffering dogs that
sniff through the night for worse eyesores than themselves whimpered and
watched her. The guard changed and the moon paled, but she stayed
on; and whatever her purpose, or whatever information she obtained in
fragments amid the raillery, she did not return to the mission house.

It was not until Rosemary McClean returned and dismounted by the door
that she realized Joanna had not kept pace. Even then she thought little
of it; the old woman often lingered on the homeward way when the chance
of her being needed was remote. Two or three hours passed before the
suspicion rose that anything might have happened to Joanna, and even
then she might not have been remembered had not Duncan McClean asked for
her.

“I have changed my mind,” he said, calling Rosemary into the long, low
living-room. It was darkened to exclude the hot wind and the glare, and
he looked like a ghost as he rose to meet her. “I have decided that my
duty is to get away from this place for your sake and for the sake of
the cause I have at heart. We are doing no good here. I can do most by
going to the Resident, or even to somebody higher up than he, and laying
my case before him personally. Send for Joanna, and tell her to go and
bring Mahommed Gunga's man.”

It was then that they missed Joanna and began to search for her. But no
Joanna came. It was then that Rosemary McClean rehearsed with her father
her former conversation with Mahommed Gunga and part, at least, of her
recent one with Ali Partab, and the missionary started off himself to
find the horseman whom Mahommed Gunga had so thoughtfully left behind.

But he very naturally found no Ali Partab. What he did discover was that
he was followed--that a guard, unarmed but obvious, was placed around
the mission house--that his servants deserted one by one--that no more
children came to the mission school.

He decided to take chances and ride off with his daughter in the night.
But the ponies went mysteriously lame, and nobody would lend or sell him
horses on any terms at all. He did his best to get a letter through to
anywhere where there were British, but nobody would take it. And then
Jaimihr came, swaggering with his escort, to offer him and his daughter
the hospitality of his palace.

He declined that offer a little testily, for the insolence behind the
offer was less than half concealed. Jaimihr sneered as he rode away.

“Perhaps a month or two of undisturbed enjoyment will induce the
padre-sahib to change his mind about my invitation!” he said nastily.
And he made no secret then, as he ordered them about before he went,
that the men who lounged and watched at every vantage-point were his.




CHAPTER X


    They looked into my eyes and laughed,--
            But, what when I was gone?
    Have strong men made me one of them?
            Or do I ride alone?

ON the morning after Mahommed Gunga's daring experiment with
Cunningham's nervous system he was anxious to say the least of it; and
that is only another way of saying that he was irritable. He watched the
Englishman at breakfast, on the dak-bungalow veranda, with a sideways
restless glance that gave the lie a dozen times over to his assumed air
of irascible authority.

“We will see now what we will see,” he muttered to himself. “These who
know such a lot imagine that the test is made. They forget that there
be many brave men of whom but a few are fit to lead. Now--now--we will
see!” And he kept on repeating that assurance to himself, with the
air of a man who would like to be assured, but is not, while he
ostentatiously found fault with every single thing on which his eyes
lit.

“One would think that the Risaldar-sahib were afraid of consequences!”
 whispered the youngest of his followers, stung to the quick by a quite
unmerited rebuke. “Does he fear that Chota-Cunnigan will beat him?”

White men have been known--often--to do stupider things than that,
and particularly young white men who have not yet learned to gauge
proportions accurately; so there was nothing really ridiculous in the
suggestion. A young white man who has had his temper worked up to
the boiling-point, his nerves deliberately racked, and then has been
subjected to the visit of a driven tiger, may be confidently expected to
exhibit all the faults of which his character is capable.

To make the situation even more ticklish, Cunningham's servant, in
his zeal for his master's comfort, had forgotten to sham sickness, and
instead of limping was in abominably active evidence. He was even doing
more than was expected of him. Ralph Cunningham had said nothing to
him--had not needed to; every single thing that a pampered sahib could
imagine that he needed was done for him in the proper order, without
noise or awkwardness, and the Risaldar cursed as he watched the
clockwork-perfect service. He had hoped for a lapse that might call
forth some pointer, either by way of irritation or amusement, as to how
young Cunningham was taking things.

But not a thing went wrong and not a sign of any sort gave Cunningham.
The youngster did not smile either to himself darkly or at his servant.
He lit his after-breakfast cigar and smoked it peacefully, as though he
had spent an absolutely normal night, without even a dream to worry him,
and if he eyed Mahommed Gunga at all, he did it so naturally, and with
so little interest, that no deductions could be drawn from it. He was
neither more nor less than a sahib at his ease--which was disconcerting,
very, to the Oriental mind.

He smoked the cigar to a finish, without a word or sign that he wished
to give audience. Then his eyes lit for the first time on the tiger-skin
that was pegged out tight, raw side upward, for the sun to sterilize;
he threw the butt of his cigar away and strolled out to examine the skin
without a sign to Mahommed Gunga, counted the claws one by one to
make sure that no superstitious native had purloined any of them, and
returned to his chair on the veranda without a word.

“Is he vindictive, then?” wondered Mahommed Gunga. “Is he a mean man?
Will he bear malice and get even with me later on? If so--”

“Present my compliments to Mahommed Gunga-sahib, and ask him to be good
enough to--”

The Risaldar heard the order, and was on his way to the veranda before
the servant started to convey the message. He took no chances on a
reprimand about his shoes, for he swaggered up in riding-boots, which
no soldier can be asked to take off before he treads on a private floor;
and he saluted as a soldier, all dignity. It was the only way by which
he could be sure to keep the muscles of his face from telling tales.

“Huzoor?”

“Morning, Mahommed Gunga. Take a seat, won't you?”

A camp-chair creaked under the descending Rajput's weight, and creaked
again as he remembered to settle himself less stiffly--less guiltily.

“I say, I'm going to ask you chaps to do me a favor. You don't mind
obliging me now and then, do you?”

The youngster leaned forward confidentially, one elbow on his knee, and
looked half-serious, as though what he had to ask were more important
than the ordinary.

“Sahib, there is nothing that we will not do.”

“Ah! Then you won't mind my mentioning this, I'm sure. Next time you
want to kennel a tiger in my bedroom, d'you mind giving me notice in
advance? It's not the stink I mind, nor being waked up; it's the deuced
awful risk of hurting somebody. Besides--look how I spoilt that tiger's
mask! The skins I've always admired at home had been shot where it
didn't show so badly.”

There was not even the symptom of a smile on Cunningham's face. He
looked straight into Mahommed Gunga's eyes, and spoke as one man talking
calm common sense to another. He raised his hand as the Rajput began to
stammer an apology.

“No. Don't apologize. If you'll forgive me for shooting your pet tiger,
I'll overlook the rest of it. If I'd known that you kept him in there
o' nights, I'd have chosen another room, that's all--some room where
I couldn't smell him, and where I shouldn't run the risk of killing an
inoffensive man. Why, I might have shot you! Think how sorry I'd have
been!”

The Risaldar did not quite know what to say; so, wiser than most, he
said nothing.

“Oh, and one other matter. I don't speak much of the language yet, so,
would you mind translating to my servant that the next time he goes sick
without giving me notice, and without putting oil in my lamp, I'll have
him fed to the tiger before he's brought into my room? Just tell him
that quietly, will you? Say it slowly so that it sinks in. Thanks.”

Straight-faced as Cunningham himself, the Risaldar tongue-lashed
the servant with harsh, tooth-rasping words that brought him up to
attention. Whether he interpreted or not the exact meaning of what
Cunningham had said, he at least produced the desired effect;
the servant mumbled apologetic nothings and slunk off the veranda
backward--to go away and hold his sides with laughter at the back of the
dak-bungalow. There Mahommed Gunga found him afterward and administered
a thrashing--not, as he was careful to explain, for disobedience, but
for having dared to be amused at the Risaldar's discomfiture.

But there was still one point that weighed heavily on Mahommed Gunga's
mind as the servant shuffled off and left him alone face to face with
Cunningham. There is as a very general rule not more than one man-eating
tiger in a neighborhood, and not even the greenest specimen of subaltern
new brought from home would be likely to mistake one for the other kind.
The man-eater was dead, and there was an engagement to shoot one that
very morning. He hesitated--said nothing for the moment--and wondered
whether his best course would be to go ahead and pretend to beat out the
jungle and tell some lie or other about the tiger having got away. But
Ralph Cunningham, with serious gray eyes fixed full on his, saved him
the trouble of deciding.

“If it's all one to you, Mahommed Gunga,” he said, the corner of his
mouth just flickering, “we'll move on from here at once. This is a
beastly old bungalow to sleep in, and shooting tigers don't seem so
terribly exciting to me. Besides, the climate here must be rotten for
the horses.”

“As you wish, sahib.”

“Very well--if the choice rests with me, I wish it. It might--ah--save
the villagers a lot of hard work beating through the jungle, mightn't
it--besides, there'll be other tigers on the road.”

“Innumerable tigers, sahib.”

“Good. Will you order a start then?”

The Risaldar departed round the corner of the bungalow, and a minute or
two later Cunningham's ears caught the sound of a riding-switch, lustily
applied, and of muffled groans. He suspected readily enough what was
going on, particularly since his servant was not in evidence, but he
dared not laugh on the veranda. He went inside, and made believe to be
busy with his bag before he relaxed the muscles of his face.

“Now, I wonder whether I handled that situation rightly?” he asked
himself between chuckles. “One thing I know--if that old ruffian plays
another trick on me--one more of any kind--Ill show my teeth. There's a
thing known as the limit!”

He would not have wondered, though, if he could have overheard Mahommed
Gunga less than an hour later. The Risaldar had stayed behind to make
sure nothing had been forgotten, and one of his men remained with him.

“There be sahibs and then sahibs,” said Mahommed Gunga. “Two kinds are
the worst--those who strike readily in anger and use bad language when
annoyed, and those whose lips are thin and who save their vengeance to
be wreaked later on. They are worse, either of them, than the sahib who
is usually drunk.”

“And Cunnigan?”

“Is altogether otherwise. As his father was, and as a few other sahibs I
have met, he understands what is not spoken--concedes dignity to him who
is caught napping, as one who having disarmed his adversary, allows him
to recover his weapon--and--”

“And?”

“Proves himself a man worth following! I myself will slit the throat of
any man I catch disparaging the name of Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur! By
the blood of God--by my medals, my own honor, and the good name of
Pukka-Cunnigan, his father, I swear it!”

“Rung Ho!” grinned the six-foot son of war who, rode beside him.

They rode on at a walk past the tombstone that--at Mahommed Gunga's
orders--the villagers had decked with sickly scented forest flowers, and
as they passed they both saluted it in silence. The fakir of the night
before, sitting not very far away from it, mimicked them. He sprang on
the stone as soon as they were out of sight, scattering the flowers all
about him, and calling down the vengeance of a hundred gods on the heads
of Christian and Mohammedan alike.




CHAPTER XI


    From lone hunt came the yearling cub
            And brought a grown kill back;
    With fangs aglut “'Tis nothing but
            Presumption!” growled the pack.

RALPH CUNNINGHAM reached Peshawur at last with no less than nine tigers
to his gun, and that in itself would have been sufficient to damn him in
the eyes of more than half of the men who held commands there. Jealousy
in those days of slow promotion and intrenched influence had eaten
into the very understanding of men whose only excuse for rule over a
conquered people ought to have been understanding.

It was not considered decent for a boy of twenty-one to do much more
than dare to be alive. For any man at all to offer advice or information
to his senior was rank presumption. Criticism was high treason. Sport,
such as tiger-shooting, was for those whose age and apoplectic temper
rendered them least fitted for it. Conservatism reigned: “High Toryism,
sir, old port, and proud Prerogative!”

Mahommed Gunga grinned into his beard at the reception that awaited the
youngster whom he had trained for months now in the belief that India
had nothing much to do except reverence him. He laughed aloud, when he
could get away to do it, at the flush of indignation on his protege's
face. Tall, lean-limbed, full of health and spirits, he had paid his
duty call on a General of Division; with the boyish enthusiasm that says
so plainly, “Laugh with me, for the world is mine!” he had boasted
his good luck on the road, only to be snubbed thoroughly and told that
tiger-shooting was not what he came for.

He took the snub like a man and made no complaint to anybody; he did
not even mention it to the other subalterns, who, most of them, made no
secret of their dissatisfaction and its hundred causes. He listened,
and it was not very long before it dawned on him that, had not Mahommed
Gunga gone with him to pay a call as well, the General Division would
not have so much as interviewed him.

Mahommed Gunga soon became the bane of his existence. The veteran seemed
in no hurry to go back to his estate that must have been in serious need
of management by this time, but would ride off on mysterious errands and
return with a dozen or more black-bearded horsemen each time. He would
introduce them to Cunningham in public whenever possible under the eyes
of outraged seniors who would swear and, fume and ride away disgust
at the reverence paid to “a mere boy, sir--a bally, ignorant young
jackanapes!”

Had Cunningham been other than a born soldier with his soldier senses
all on edge and sleepless, he would have fallen foul of disgrace within
a month. He was unattached as yet, and that fact gave opportunity to
the men who looked for it to try to “take the conceit out of the cub, by
gad.”

“They “--everybody spoke of them as “they”--conceived the brilliant idea
of confronting the youngster with conditions which he lacked experience
to cope with. They set him to deal with circumstances which had long
ago proved too difficult for themselves, and awaited confidently the
outcome--the crass mistake, or oversight, or mere misfortune that, with
the aid of a possible court martial, would reduce him to a proper state
of humbleness.

Peshawur, the greatest garrison in northern India, was there on
sufferance, apparently. For lack of energetic men in authority to deal
with them, the border robbers plundered while the troops remained cooped
up within the unhealthiest station on the list. The government itself,
with several thousand troops to back it up, was paying blackmail to the
border thieves! There was not a government bungalow in all Peshawur that
did not have its “watchman,” hired from over the border, well paid to
sleep on the veranda lest his friends should come and take tribute in an
even more unseemly manner.

The younger men, whose sense of fitness had not yet been rotted by
climate and system and prerogative, swore at the condition; there were
one or two men higher up, destined to make history, whose voices, raised
in emphatic protest, were drowned in the drone of “Peace! Peace is the
thing to work for. Compromise, consideration, courtesy, these three are
the keys of rule.” They failed to realize that cowardice was their
real keynote, and that the threefold method that they vaunted was quite
useless without a stiffening of courage.

So brave men, who had more courtesy in each of their fingers than
most of the seniors had all put together, had to bow to a scandalous
condition that made England's rule a laughing-stock within a stone's
throw of the city limits. And they had to submit to the indecency of
seeing a new, inexperienced arrival picked for the task of commanding a
body of irregulars, for no other reason than because it was considered
wise to make an exhibition of him.

Cunningham became half policeman, half soldier, in charge of a small
special force of mounted men engaged for the purpose of patrol. He had
nothing to do with the selection of them; that business was attended
to perfunctorily by a man very high up in departmental service, who
considered Cunningham a nuisance. He was a gentleman who did not know
Mahommed Gunga; another thing he did not know was the comfortable feel
of work well done; so he was more than pleased when Mahommed Gunga
dropped in from nowhere in particular--paid him scandalously untrue
compliments without a blush or a smile and offered to produce the
required number of men at once.

Only fifty were required. Mahommed Gunga brought three hundred to select
from, and, when asked to do so in order to save time and trouble, picked
out the fifty best.

“There are your men!” said the Personage off-handedly, when they had
been sworn in in a group. “Be good enough to remember, Mr. Cunningham,
that you are now responsible for their behavior, and for the proper
night patrolling of the city limits.”

That was a tall order, and in spite of all of youth's enthusiasm was
enough to make any young fellow nervous. But Mahommed Gunga met him in
the street, saluted him with almost sacrilegious ceremony, and drew him
to one side.

“Have courage, now, bahadur! I ride away to visit my estates (he spoke
of them always in the plural, as though he owned a county or two). You
have under you the best eyes and the keenest blades along the border for
I attended to it! Be ruthless! Use them, work them--sweat them to death!
Keep away from messes and parades; seek no praise, for you will get none
in any case! Work! Work for what is coming!”

“You speak as though the fate of a continent were hanging in the
balance,” laughed Cunningham, shaking hands with him.

“I speak truth!” said Mahommed Gunga, riding off and leaving the
youngster wondering.

Now, there was nothing much the matter with the men on either side,
taken in the main, who hated one another on that far-pushed frontier.
Even the insufferable incompetents who held the rotting reins of control
were such because circumstance had blinded them. There was not a man
among the highly placed ones even who would have deliberately placed his
own importance or his own opinion in the scale against India's welfare.
There was not a border thief but was ready to respect what he could
recognize as strong-armed justice.

The root of the trouble lay in centralization of authority, and rigid
adherence to the rule of seniority. Combined, these two processes had
served to bring about a state of things that is nearly unbelievable when
viewed in the light of modern love for efficiency. Young men, with the
fire of ambition burning in them and a proper scorn for mere superficial
ceremony, had to sweat their tempers and bow down beneath the yoke of
senile pompousness.

Strong, savage, powder-weaned Hill-tribesmen--inheritors of egoistic
independence and a love of loot--laughed loud and long and openly at
System that prevented officers from taking arms against them until
authority could come by delegate from somebody who slept. By that time
they would be across the border, quarrelling among themselves about
division of the plunder!

They had respect in plenty for the youth and virile middle age that
dealt with them on the rare occasions when a timely blow was loosed.
Then they had proof that from that strange, mad country overseas there
came men who could lead men--men who could strike, and who knew enough
to hold their hands when the sudden blow had told--just men, who could
keep their plighted word. No border thief pretended that the British
could not rule him; to a man, they laughed because the possible was not
imposed. And to the last bold, ruffianly iconoclast they stole when,
where, and what they dared.

Things altered strangely soon after Ralph Cunningham, with the
diffidence of youth but the blood of a line of soldiers leaping in
him, took charge of his tiny force of nondescripts. They were neither
soldiers nor police. Nominally, he was everybody's dog, and so were
they; actually he found himself at the head of a tiny department of
his own, because it was nobody's affair to give him orders. They had
deliberately turned him loose “to hang himself,” and their hope that he
might get his head into a noose of trouble as soon as possible--the very
liberty they gave him, on purpose for his quick damnation--was the means
of making reputation for him.

Nobody advised him; so with singularly British phlegm and not more
than ordinary common sense he devised a method of his own for scotching
night-prowlers. He stationed his men at well-considered vantage-points,
and trusted them. With a party of ten, he patrolled the city ceaselessly
himself and whipped every “watchman” he caught sleeping. One by one, the
blackmailing brigade began to see the discomfort of a job that called
for real wakefulness, and deserted over the Hills to urge the resumption
of raids in force. One by one, the night-prowling fraternity were
shot as they sneaked past sentries. One by one, the tale of robberies
diminished. It was merely a question of one man, and he awake,
having power to act without first submitting a request to somebody in
triplicate on blue-form B.

The time came, after a month or two, when even natives dared to leave
their houses after dark. The time came very soon, indeed, when the
nearest tribes began to hold war councils and inveigh against the
falling off of the supply of plunder. Cunningham was complimented
openly. He was even praised by one of “Them.” So it was perfectly
natural, and quite in keeping with tradition, that he should shortly
be relieved, and that a senior to him should be placed in charge of his
little force, with orders to “organize” it.

The organization process lasted about twelve hours; at the end of that
time every single man had deserted, horse and arms! Two nights later,
the prowling and plundering was once more in full swing, and Cunningham
was blamed for it; it was obvious to any man of curry-and-port-wine
proclivities that his method, or lack of it, had completely undermined
his men's loyalty!

A whole committee of gray-headed gentlemen took trouble to point out
to him his utter failure; but a brigadier, who was not a member of that
committee, and who was considered something of an upstart, asked that
he might be appointed to a troop of irregular cavalry that had recently
been raised. With glee--with a sigh of relief so heartfelt and unanimous
that it could be heard across the street--the committee leaped at the
suggestion. The proper person was induced without difficulty to put
his signature to the required paper, and Cunningham found himself
transferred to irregular oblivion. Incidentally he found himself
commanding few less than a hundred men, so many of whose first names
were Mahommed or Mohammed that the muster-roll looked like a list of
Allah's prophets.

Cunningham was more than a little bit astonished, on the day he joined,
in camp, a long way from Peshawur, to find his friend Mahommed Gunga,
seated in a bell tent with the Brigadier. He caught sight of the long
black military boot and silver spur, and half-recognized the up-and-down
movement of the crossed leg long before he reached the tent. It was
like father and son meeting, almost, as the Rajput rose to greet him
and waited respectfully until he had paid his compliments to his new
commander. Cunningham felt throat-bound, and could scarcely more than
stammer his introduction of himself.

“I know who you are and all about you,” said the Brigadier. “Used to
know your father well. I applied to have you in my command partly for
your father's sake, but principally because Risaldar Mahommed Gunga
spake so highly of you. He tells me he has had an eye on you from the
start, and that you shape well. Remember, this is irregular cavalry, and
in many respects quite unlike regulars. You'll need tact and a firm hand
combined, and you mustn't ever forget that the men whom you will lead
are gentlemen.”

Cunningham reported to his Colonel, only to discover that he, too, knew
all about him. The Colonel was less inclined to be restricted as to
topic, and less mindful of discretion than the Brigadier.

“I hear they couldn't stand you in Peshawur. That's hopeful! If you'd
come with a recommendation from that quarter, I'd have packed you off
back again. I never in my life would have believed that a dozen men
could all shut their eyes so tightly to the signs--never!”

“The signs, sir?”

“Yes, the signs! Come and look your troop over.”

Cunningham found that the troop, too, had heard about his coming. He
did not look them over. When he reached the lines, they came out in a
swarm--passed him one by one, eyed him, as traders eye a horse--and then
saluted him a second time, with the greeting:

“Salaam, Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur!”

“Yes! You're in disgrace!” said his Colonel, noticing the color rising
to the youngster's cheeks.





CHAPTER XII


    Sons of the sons of war we be,
    Sabred and horsed, and whole and free;
    One is the caste, and one degree,--
            One law,--one code decreed us.
    Who heads wolves in the dawning day?
    Who leaps in when the bull's at bay?
    He who dare is he who may!
            Now, rede ye who shall lead us!

THE check that Ralph Cunningham's management of his police had caused,
and the subsequent resumption of night looting, served to whet the
appetites of the hungry crowd beyond the border. Those closest to
Peshawur, who had always done the looting, were not the ultimate
consignees by any means; there were other tribes who bought from
them--others yet to whom they paid tribute in the shape of stolen
rifles. Cunningham's administration had upset the whole modus vivendi of
the lower Himalayas!

Though it all began again the moment he was superseded, there had been,
none the less, a three-month interregnum, and that had to be compensated
for. The tribes at the rear were clamorous and would not listen to
argument or explanation; they had collected in hundreds, led by the
notorious Khumel Khan, preparatory to raiding in real earnest and with
sufficient force to carry all before them at the first surprise attack.

They were disappointed when the pilfering resumed, for a tribal Hillman
would generally rather fight than eat, and would always prefer his
dinner from a dead enemy's cooking-pot. They sat about for a long time,
considering whether there were not excuse enough for war in any case
and listening to the intricately detailed information brought by the
deserting watchmen. And as they discussed things, but before they had
time to decide on any plan, the Brigadier commanding the Irregulars got
wind of them.

He was a man who did not worry about the feelings of senile heads of
red-tape-bound departments; nor was he particularly hidebound by respect
for the laws of evidence. When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he
either acted or did not act, as the circumstances might dictate. And
when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of
criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in
several colored inks, on all the special forms he could get hold of. The
heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying
to get the form of the report straightened out to be able to give any
attention to the details of it; and then it would be too late. But he
was a brigadier, and what he could do with impunity and quiet amusement
would have brought down the whole Anglo-Indian Government in awful wrath
on the head of a subordinate.

He heard of the tribesmen under Khumel Khan one evening. At dawn his
tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the
green grass. The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where
the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.

The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the
Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs
as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the
squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the
half-awakened plotters of the night before.

There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early
morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill. Long lances--devils'
antennae--searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought
cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed
troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments. In an hour, or less,
there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and
a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again
for a year or two to come.

But Khumel Khan was missing. Khumel Khan, the tulwar man--he whose boast
it was that he could hew through two men's necks at one whistling sweep
of his notched, curved cimeter--had broken through with a dozen at his
back. He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of
the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the
overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.

“Mr. Cunningham! Take your troop, please, and find their chief! Hunt him
out, ride him down, and get him! Don't come back until you do!”

The real thing! The real red thing within a year! A lone
command--and that is the only thing a subaltern of spunk may pray
for!--eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the
opportunity to show their worth--lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no
commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight--as sure as God made
mountains, a fight at the other end! There are men here and there who
think that the day when they pass down a crowded aisle with Her is the
great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun. And there
are others. There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming
of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit
out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the
other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.

There were crisscross trails, where low-hung clouds swept curtainwise to
make the compass seem like a lie-begotten trick. There were
gorges, hewn when the Titans needed dirt to build the awful
Himalayas--shadow-darkened--sheer as the edge of Nemesis. Long-reaching,
pile on pile, the over-lapping spurs leaned over them. The wind blew
through them amid silence that swallowed and made nothing of the din
which rides with armed men.

But, with eyes that were made for hunting, on horses that seemed part
of them, they tracked and trailed--and viewed at last. Their shout gave
Khumel Khan his notice that the price of a hundred murders was overdue,
and he chose to make payment where a V-shaped cliff enclosed a small,
flat plateau and not more than a dozen could ride at him at a time. His
companions scattered much as a charge of shrapnel shrieks through the
rocks, but Khumel Khan knew well enough that he was the quarry--his was
the head that by no conceivable chance would be allowed to plan
fresh villainies. He might have run yet a little way, but he saw the
uselessness, and stood.

The troop, lined out knee to knee, could come within a hundred paces of
him without breaking; it formed a base, then, to a triangle from which
the man at bay could no more escape than a fire-ringed scorpion.

“Call on him to surrender!” ordered Cunningham.

A chevroned black-beard half a horse-length behind him translated the
demand into stately Pashtu, and for answer the hill chieftain mounted
his stolen horse and shook his tulwar. He had pistols at his belt, but
he did not draw them; across his shoulder swung a five-foot-long jezail,
but he loosed it and flung it to the ground.

“Is there any here dare take me single-handed?” he demanded with a grin.

Of the eight-and-eighty, there were eighty-eight who dared; but there
was an eighty-ninth, a lad of not yet twenty-two, whom Indian chivalry
desired to honor. The troop had heard but the troop had not yet seen.

“Ride in and take him!” ordered Cunningham and there was a
thoroughly well acted make-believe of fear, while every eye watched
“Cunnigan-bahadur,” and the horses, spurred and reined at once, pranced
at their bits for just so long as a good man needs to make his mind up.
And Cunningham rode in.

He rode in as a Rajput rides, with a swoop and a swinging sabre and a
silent, tight-lipped vow that he would prove himself. Green though he
was yet, he knew that the troop had found for him--had rounded up for
him--had made him his opportunity; so he took it, right under their
eyes, straight in the teeth of the stoutest tulwar man of the lower
Himalayas.

He, too, had pistols at his belt, but there was no shot fired. There
was nothing but a spur-loosed rush and a shock--a spark-lit, swirling,
slashing, stamping, snorting melee--a stallion and a mare up-ended--two
strips of lightning steel that slit the wind--and a thud, as a lifeless
border robber took the turf.

There was silence then--the grim, good silence of Mohammedan
approval--while a native officer closed up a sword-cut with his fingers
and tore ten-yard strips from his own turban to bind the youngster's
head. They rode back without boast or noise and camped without
advertisement. There was no demonstration made; only-a colonel said,
“I like things done that way, quickly, without fuss,” and a brigadier
remarked, “Hrrrumph! 'Gratulate you, Mr. Cunningham!”

Later, when they camped again outside Peshawur, a reward of three
thousand rupees that had been offered on the border outlaw's head was
paid to Cunningham in person--a very appreciable sum to a subaltern,
whose pay is barely sufficient for his mess bills. So, although no
public comment was made on the matter, it was considered “decent of him”
 to contribute the whole amount to a pension fund for the dependents of
the regiment's dead.

“You know, that's your money,” said his Colonel. “You can keep every
anna of it if you choose.”

“I suppose I needn't be an officer unless I choose?” suggested
Cunningham.

“I don't know, youngster! I can't guess what your troop would do if you
tried to desert it!”

That was, of course, merely a diplomatic recognition of the fact that
Cunningham had done his duty in making his men like him, and was not
intended seriously. Nobody--not even the Brigadier--had any notion that
the troop would very shortly have to dispense with its leader's services
whether it wanted to or not.

But it so happened that one troop at a time was requisitioned to be
ornamental body-guard to such as were entitled to one in the frontier
city; and the turn arrived when Cunningham was sent. None liked the
duty. No soldier, and particularly no irregular, likes to consider
himself a pipe-clayed ornament; but Cunningham would have “gone sick”
 had he had the least idea of what was in store for him.

It was bad enough to be obliged to act as body-guard to men who had
jockeyed him away because they were jealous of him. The white scar that
ran now like a chin-strap mark from the corner of his eye to the angle
of his jaw would blaze red often at some deliberately thought-out,
not fancied, insult from men who should have been too big to more than
notice him. And that, again, was nothing to the climax.

Mahommed Gunga chose to polish up his silver spurs and ride in from his
“estates” on a protracted visit to Peshawur, and with an escort that
must have included half the zemindars on the countryside as well as
his own small retinue. Glittering on his own account like a regiment of
horse, and with all but a regiment clattering behind him, he chose
the occasion to meet Cunningham when the youngster was fuming with
impatience opposite the club veranda, waiting to escort a general.

On the veranda sat a dozen men who had been at considerable pains to
put and keep the officer of the escort in his place. If the jingle and
glitter of the approaching cavalcade had not been sufficient to attract
their notice, they could have stopped their cars and yet have been
forced to hear the greeting.

“Aha! Salaam sahib! Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, bohut salaam! Thy father's
son! Sahib, I am much honored!”

The white scar blazed, but Mahommed Gunga affected not to notice the
discomfort of his victim. Many more than a hundred sabred gentlemen
pressed round to “do themselves the honor,” as they expressed it, of
paying Cunningham a compliment. They rode up like knights in armor in
the lists, and saluted like heralds bringing tribute and allegiance.

“Salaam, Chota-Cunnigan!”

“Salaam, sahib!”

“Bohut salaam, bahadur!”

The Generals, the High-Court judges, and Commissioners on the club
veranda sat unhonored, while a boy of twenty-two received obeisance from
men whose respect a king might envy. No Rajput ever lived who was not
sure that his salute was worth more than tribute; he can be polite on
all occasions, and what he thinks mere politeness would be considered
overacting in the West, but his respect and his salute he keeps for his
equals or his betters--and they must be men indeed.

The coterie of high officials sat indignation-bound for ten palpitating
minutes, until the General remembered that it was his escort that was
waiting for him. He had ordered it an hour too soon, for the express
sweet purpose of keeping Cunningham waiting in the sun, but it dawned
now on his apoplectic consciousness that his engagement was most urgent.
He descended in a pompous hurry, mounted and demanded why--by all the
gods of India--the escort was not lined up to receive him. A minute
later, after a loudly administered reprimand that was meant as much for
the swarm of Rajputs as for the indignant Cunningham, he rode off with
the escort clattering behind him.

But on the club veranda, when the Rajputs with Mahommed Gunga had
dispersed, the big wigs sat and talked the matter over very thoroughly.

“It's no use blinking matters,” said the senior man present, using a
huge handkerchief to wave the flies away from the polished dome which
rose between two side wisps of gray hair. “They're going to lionize him
while he's here, so we'd better move him on.”

“But where?”

“I've got it! There's a letter in from Everton at Abu, saying he needs
a man badly to go to Howrah and act resident there--says he hasn't heard
from the missionaries and isn't satisfied--wants a man without too much
authority to go there and keep an eye on things in general. Howrah's a
hell of a place from all accounts.”

“But that 'ud be promotion!”

“Can't be helped. No excuse for reducing him, so far as I've heard. The
trouble is the cub has done too dashed well. We've got to promote him if
we want to be rid of him.”

They talked it over for an hour, and at the end of it decided Cunningham
should go to Howrah, provided a brigadier could be induced without too
much argument to see reason.

“The Brigadier probably wants to keep him, and his Colonel will raise
all the different kinds of Cain there are!” suggested the man who had
begun the discussion.

“I've seen brigadiers before now reduced to a proper sense of their
own unimportance!” remarked another man. And he was connected with the
Treasury. He knew.

But a week later, when the papers were sent to the Brigadier for
signature, he amazed everybody by consenting without the least
objection. Nobody but he knew who his visitor had been the night before.

“How did you know about it, Mahommed Gunga?” he demanded, as the veteran
sat and faced him over the tent candle, his one lean leg swaying up and
down, as usual, above the other.

“Have club servants not got ears, sahib?”

“And you--?”

“I, too, have ears--good ones!”

The Brigadier drummed his fingers on the table, hesitating. No officer,
however high up in the service, likes to lose even a subaltern from his
command when that subaltern is worth his salt.

“Let him go, sahib! You have seen how we Rangars honor him--you may
guess what difference he might make in a crisis. Sign, sahib--let him
go!”

“But--where do you come in? What have you had to do with this?”

“First, sahib, I tested him thoroughly. I found him good. Second, I told
tales about him, making him out better than even he is. Third, I made
sure that all those in authority at Peshawur should hate him. That
would have been impossible if he had been a fool, or a weak man, or
an incompetent; but any good man can be hated easily. Fourth, sahib, I
sent, by the hand of a man of mine, a message to Everton-sahib at Abu
reporting to him that it was not in Howrah as it should be, and warning
him that a sahib should be sent there. I knew that he would listen to a
hint from me, and I knew that he had no one in his office whom he could
send. Then, sahib, I brought matters to a head by bringing every man of
merit whom I could raise to salute him and make an outrageous exhibition
of him. That is what I have done!”

“One would think you were scheming for a throne, Mahommed Gunga!”

“Nay, sahib, I am scheming for the peace of India! But there will be war
first.”

“I know there will be war,” said the Brigadier. “I only wish I could
make the other sahibs realize it.”

“Will you sign the paper, sahib?”

“Yes, I will sign the paper. But--”

“But what, sahib?”

“I'm not quite certain that I'm doing right.”

“Brigadier-sahib, when the hour comes--and that is soon--it will be time
to answer that! There lie the papers.”




CHAPTER XIII


    Even in darkness lime and sand
            Will blend to make up mortar.
    Two by two would equal four
            Under a bucket of water.

NOW it may seem unimaginable that two Europeans could be cooped in
Howrah, not under physical restraint, and yet not able to communicate
with any one who could render them assistance. It was the case, though,
and not by any means an isolated case. The policy of the British
Government, once established in India, was and always has been not to
occupy an inch of extra territory until compelled by circumstances.

The native states, then, while forbidden to contract alliances with
one another or the world outside, and obliged by the letter of written
treaties to observe certain fundamental laws imposed on them by the
Anglo-Indian Government, were left at liberty to govern themselves. And
it was largely the fact that they could and did keep secret what was
going on within their borders that enabled the so-called Sepoy Rebellion
to get such a smouldering foothold before it burst into a blaze. The
sepoys were the tools of the men behind the movement; and the men behind
were priests and others who were feeling nothing but their own ambition.

No man knows even now how long the fire rebellion had been burning
underground before showed through the surface; but it is quite obvious
that, in spite of the heroism shown by British and loyal native alike
when the crash did come, the rebels must have won--and have won easily
sheer weight of numbers--had they only used the amazing system solely
for the broad, comprehensive purpose for which it was devised.

But the sense of power that its ramifications and extent gave birth to
also whetted the desires individuals. Each man of any influence at all
began to scheme to use the system for the furtherance of his individual
ambition. Instead of bending all their energy and craft to the one
great object of hurling an unloved conqueror back whence he came, each
reigning prince strove to scheme himself head and shoulders above the
rest; and each man who wanted to be prince began to plot harder than
ever to be one.

So in Howrah the Maharajah's brother, Jaimihr, with a large following
and organization of his own, began to use the secret system of which he
by right formed an integral part and to set wheels working within the
wheels which in course of time should spew him up on the ledge which his
brother now occupied. Long before the rebellion was ready he had all
his preparations made and waited only for the general conflagration to
strike for his own hand. And was so certain of success that he dared
make plans as well for Rosemary McClean's fate.

There is a blindness, too, quite unexplainable that comes over whole
nations sometimes. It is almost like a plague in its mysterious arrival
and departure. As before the French Revolution there were almost none of
the ruling classes who could read the writing on the wall, so it was in
India in the spring of '57. Men saw the signs and could not read their
meaning. As in France, so in India, there were a few who understood, but
they were scoffed at; the rest--the vast majority who held the reins of
power--were blind.

Rosemary McClean discovered that her pony had gone lame, and was angry
with the groom. The groom ran away, and she put that down to native
senselessness. Duncan McClean sent one after another of the little
native children to find him a man who would take a letter to Mount Abu.
The children went and did not come back again, and he put that down to
the devil, who would seem to have reclaimed them.

Both of them saw the watchers, posted at every vantage-point, insolently
wakeful; both of them knew that Jaimihr had placed them there. But
neither of them looked one inch deeper than the surface, nor supposed
that their presence betokened anything but the prince's unreachable
ambition. Neither of them thought for an instant that the day could
possibly have come when Britain would be unable to protect a woman of
its own race, or when a native--however powerful--would dare to do more
than threaten.

Joanna disappeared, and that led to a chain of thought which was not
creditable to any one concerned. They reasoned this way: Rosemary had
seen Mahommed Gunga hold out a handful of gold coins for the old
woman's eyes to glitter at, therefore it was fair to presume that he
had promised her a reward for bringing word to the man whom, it was
now known, he had left behind. She had brought word to him and had
disappeared. What more obvious than to reason that the man had gladly
paid her, and had just as gladly ridden off, rejoicing at the thought
that he could escape doing service?

“So much,” they argued, “for native constancy! So much for Mahommed
Gunga's boast that he knew of men who could be trusted! And so much for
Joanna's gratitude!”

The old woman had been saved by Rosemary McClean from the long-drawn-out
hell that is the life portion of most Indian widows, even of low caste;
she had had little to do, ever, beyond snooze in the shade and eat, and
run sometimes behind the pony--a task which came as easily to her as
did the other less active parts of her employment. Her desertion,
particularly at a crisis, made Rosemary McClean cry, and set her father
to quoting Shakespeare's “King Lear.”

   “Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
    Thou art not so unkind
    As man's ingratitude!”

All Scotsmen seem to have a natural proclivity for quoting
the appropriate dirge when sorrow shows itself. The Book of
Lamentations--Shakespeare's sadder lines--roll off their tongues
majestically and seem to give them consolation--as it were to lay a
sound, unjoyous basis for the proper enjoyment of the songs of Robbie
Burns.

The poor old king of the poet's imagining, declaiming up above the
cliffs of Dover, could have put no more pathos into those immortal lines
than did Duncan McClean as he paced up and down between the hot wars
of the darkened room. The dry air parched his throat, and his ambition
seemed to shrivel in him as he saw the brave little woman who was all he
had sobbing with her head between her hands.

He turned to the Bible, but he could find no precedent in any of its
pages for abandoning a quest like his in the teeth of disaster or
adversity. He read it for hour after crackling hour, moistening
his throat from time to time with warm, unappetizing water from the
improvised jar filter; but when the oven blast that makes the Indian
summer day a hell on earth had waned and died away, he had found nothing
but admonishment to stand firm. There had been women, too, whose
deeds were worthy of record in that book, and he found no argument
for deserting his post on his daughter's account either. In the Bible
account, as he read it, it had always been the devil who fled when
things got too uncomfortable for him, and he was conscious of a
tight-lipped, stern contempt for the devil.

He had about made up his mind what line to take with his daughter, when
she ceased her sobbing and looked up through swollen eyes to relieve him
of the necessity for talking her over to his point view. What she said
amazed him, but not be cause it came to him as a new idea. She said, in
different words, exactly what was passing in his own mind, and it was as
though her tears and his search of the Scriptures had brought them both
to one clear-cut conclusion.

“Why are we here, father?” she asked him suddenly; and because she took
him by surprise he did not answer her at once. “We are here to do
good aren't we?” That was no question; it was beginning of a line of
argument. Her father held his tongue, and laid his Bible down, and
listened on. “How much good have we done yet?”

She paused, but the pause was rhetorical, and he knew it; he could see
the light behind her eyes that was more than visionary; it was the light
of practical Scots enthusiasm, unquenched and undiscouraged after a
battle with fear itself. She began to be beautiful again as the spirit
of unconquerable courage won its way.

“Have we won one convert? Is there one, of those you have taught who is
with us still?”

The answer was self-evident. There was none. But there was no sting for
him in what she asked. Rather her words came as a relief, for he could
feel the strength behind them. He still said nothing.

“Have we stopped one single suttee? Have we once, in any least degree,
lessened the sufferings of one of those poor widows?”

“Not once,” he answered her, without a trace of shame. He knew, and she
knew, how hard the two of them had tried. There was nothing to apologize
for.

“Have we undermined the power of the Hindoo priests? Have we removed one
trace of superstition?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Have we given up the fight?”

He looked hard at her. Gray eyes under gray brows met gray eyes that
shone from under dark, wet lashes, and deep spoke unto deep. Scotsman
recognized Scotswoman, and the bond between them tightened.

“It seems to me”--there was a new thrill in her voice--“that here is
our opportunity! Either Jaimihr wants to frighten us away or he is in
earnest with his impudent attentions to me. In either case let us make
no attempt to go away. Let us refuse to go away. Let us stay here at all
costs. If he wishes us to go away, then he must have a reason and will
show it, or else try to force us. If he is really trying to make love
to me, then let him try; if he has pluck enough, let him seize me. In
either case we shall force his hand. I am willing to be the bait. The
moment that he harms either you or me, the government will have to
interfere. If he kills us so much the better, for that would mean swift
vengeance and a British occupation. That would stop suttee for all time,
and we would have given our lives for something worth while. As we are,
we cannot communicate with our government, and Jaimihr thinks he has us
in his grasp. Let him think it! Let him go ahead! Sooner or later the
government must find out that we are missing Then--!” Her eyes blazed at
the thought of what would happen then.

Her father looked at her for about a minute, sadness and pride in her
fighting in him for the mastery. Then he rose and crossed the little
space between them.

“Lassie!” he said. “Lassie!”

She took his hand--the one little touch of human sentiment lacking to
disturb his emotional balance. The Scots will talk readily enough of
sorrow, but at showing it they are a grudging race of men. Unless a
Scotsman thinks he can gain something for his cause by showing what
emotion racks him, he will swallow down the choking flood of grief, and
keep a straight face to the world and his own as well. Duncan McClean
turned from her--drew his hand away--and walked to open the slit
shutters. A moment later he came back, once more master of himself.

“As things are, dear,” he said gently, “how would it be possible for us
to get away?”

“'We canna gang awa'!” she quoted, with a smile.

“NO, lassie. We must stay here and be brave. This matter is not in our
hands. We must wait, and watch, and see. If opportunity should come
to us to make our escape, we will seize it. Should it not come--should
Jaimihr, or some other of them, make occasion to molest us--it may
be--it might be that--surely the day of martyrs is not past--it might
be that--well, well, in either case we will eventually win. Should they
kill us, the government must send here to avenge us; should we get away,
surely our report will be listened to. A month or two--perhaps only a
week or two--even a day or two, who knows?--and the last suttee will
have been performed!”

He stood and stroked her head--then stooped and kissed it--an unusual
betrayal of emotion from him.

“Ye're a brave lassie,” he said, leaving the room hurriedly, to escape
the shame of letting her see tears welling from his eyes--salt tears
that scalded as they broke their hot-wind-wearied bounds.

Five minutes later she arose, dry-eyed, and went to stand in the
doorway, where an eddy or two of lukewarm evening breeze might possibly
be stirring. But a dirtily clad Hindoo, lounging on a raised, railless
store veranda opposite, leered at her impudently, and she came inside
again--to pass the evening and the sultry, black, breathless night out
of sight, at least, of the brutes who shut her off from even exercise.





CHAPTER XIV


    So, I am a dog? Hence I must come
            To do thy bidding faster?
    Must tell thee--Nay, a dog stays dumb!
            A dog obeys one master!

NOT many yards from where the restless elephants stood lined under
big brick arches--in an age-old courtyard, three sides of which were
stone-carved splendor and the fourth a typically Eastern mess of
stables, servants' quarters, litter, stink, and noisy confusion--a
stone door, slab-hewn, gave back the aching glitter of the sun. Its only
opening--a narrow slit quite near the top--was barred. A man--his face
close-pressed against them--peered through the interwoven iron rods from
within.

Jaimihr, in a rose-pink pugree still, but not at all the swaggering
cavalier who pranced, high-booted, through the streets--a down-at-heel
prince, looking slovenly and heavy-eyed from too much opium--sat in
a long chair under the cloister which faced the barred stone door. He
swished with a rhino riding-whip at the stone column beside him, and the
much-swathed individual of the plethoric paunch who stood and spoke with
him kept a very leery eye on it; he seemed to expect the binding swish
of it across his own shins, and the thought seemed tantalizing.

“It is not to be done,” said Jaimihr, speaking in a dialect peculiar
to Howrah. “That--of all the idiotic notions I have listened to--is the
least worth while! Thy brains are in thy belly and are lost amid the
fat! If my brother Howrah only had such counsellors as thou--such monkey
folk to make his plans for him--the jackals would have finished with him
long ago.”

“Sahib, did I not bring word, and overhear, and trap the man?”

“Truly! Overheard whisperings, and trapped me a hyena I must feed!
Now thou sayest, 'Torture him!' He is a Rangar, and of good stock;
therefore, no amount of torturing will make him speak. He is that pig
Mahommed Gunga's man; therefore, there' is nothing more sure than that
Mahommed Gunga will be here, sooner or later, to look for him--Mahommed
Gunga, with the half of a Hindoo name, the whole of a Moslem's fire, and
the blind friendship of the British to rely on!”

“But if the man be dead when Mahommed Gunga comes?”

“He will be dead when Mahommed Gunga comes, if only what we await has
first happened. But this rising that is planned hangs fire. Were I
Maharajah I would like to see the Rangar who dare flout me or ask
questions! I would like but to set eyes on that Rangar once! But I
am not yet Maharajah; I am a prince--a younger brother--surrounded,
counselled, impeded, hampered, rendered laughable by fat idiots!”

“My belly but shows your highness's generosity. At whose cost have I
grown fat?”

“Ay, at whose cost? I should have kept thee slim, on prison diet, and
saved myself a world of useless problems! Cease prattling! Get away from
me! If I have to poison this Ali Partab, or wring his casteless neck, I
will make thee do it, and give thee to Mahommed Gunga to wreak vengeance
on. Leave me to think!”

The fat former occupant of the room above the arch of the caravansary
waddled to the far end of the cloister, and sat down, cross-legged,
to grumble to himself and scratch his paunch at intervals. His master,
low-browed and irritable, continued to strike the stone column with his
cane. He was in a horrid quandary.

Mahommed Gunga was one of many men he did not want, for the present,
to offend seriously. Given a fair cause for quarrel, that irascible
ex-Risaldar was capable of going to any lengths, and was known,
moreover, to be trusted by the British. Nobody seemed to know whether or
not Mahommed Gunga reciprocated the British regard, and nobody had cared
to ask him except his own intimates; and they, like he, were men of
close counsel.

The Prince had given no orders for the capture of Ali Partab; that had
been carried out by his men in a fit of ill-advised officiousness. But
the Prince had to solve the serious problem caused by the presence of
Ali Partab within a stone-walled cell.

Should he let the fellow go, a report would be certain to reach Mahommed
Gunga by the speediest route. Vengeance would be instantly decided on,
for a Rajput does not merely accept service; he repays it, feudal-wise,
and smites hip and thigh for the honor of his men. The vengeance would
be sure to follow purely Eastern lines, and would be complicated; it
would no doubt take the form of siding in some way or other with his
brother the Maharajah. There would be instant, active doings, for
that was Mahommed Gunga's style! The fat would be in the fire months,
perhaps, before the proper time.

The prisoner's presence was maddening in a million ways. It had been the
Prince's plan (for he knew well enough that Mahommed Gunga had left a
man behind) to allow the escape to start; then it would have been an
easy matter to arrange an ambush--to kill Ali Partab--and to pretend to
ride to the rescue. Once rescued, Miss McClean and her father would be
almost completely at his mercy, for they would not be able to accuse him
of anything but friendliness, and would be obliged to return to whatever
haven of safety he cared to offer them. Once in his palace of their own
consent, they would have had to stay there until the rising of the
whole of India put an end to any chance of interference from the British
Government.

But now there was no Ali Partab outside to try to escort them to
some place of safety; therefore, there was little chance that the
missionaries would try to make a bolt. Instead of being in the position
of a cat that watches silently and springs when the mouse breaks cover,
he was in the unenviable condition now of being forced to make the first
move. Over and over again he cursed the men who had made Ali Partab
prisoner, and over and over again: he wondered how--by all the gods of
all the multitudinous Hindoo mythology--how, when, and by what stroke
of genius he could make use of the stiff-chinned Rangar and convert him
from being a rankling thorn into a useful aid.

He dared not poison him--yet. For the same reason he dared not put him
to the torture, to discover, or try to discover, what Mahommed Gunga's
real leanings were in the matter of loyalty to the Raj or otherwise. He
dared not let the man go, for forgiveness is not one of the virtues
held in high esteem by men of Ali Partab's race, and wrongful arrest is
considered ground enough for a feud to the death. It seemed he did not
dare do anything!

He racked his opium-dulled brain for a suspicion of a plan that
might help solve the difficulty, until his eye--wandering around the
courtyard--fell on the black shape of a woman. She was old and bent and
she was busied, with a handful of dry twigs, pretending to sweep around
the stables.

“Who is that mother of corruption?” demanded Jaimihr; and a man came
running to him.

“Who is that eyesore? I have never seen her, have I?”

“Highness, she is a beggar woman. She sat by the gate, and pretended
to a power of telling fortunes--which it would seem she does possess in
some degree. It was thought better that she should use her gift in here,
for our advantage, than outside to our disadvantage. So she was brought
in and set to sweeping.”

“By the curse of the sin of the sack of Chitor, is my palace, then,
a midden for the crawling offal of all the Howrah streets? First this
Rangar--next a sweeper hag--what follows? What bring you next? Go, fetch
the street dogs in!”

“Highness, she is useful and costs nothing but the measure or two of
meal she eats.”

“A horse eats little more!” the angry Prince retorted, perfectly
accustomed to being argued with by his own servants. That is the
time-honored custom of the East; obedience is one thing--argument
another--both in their way are good, and both have their innings. “Bring
her to me--nay!--keep her at a decent distance--so!--am I dirt for her
broom?”

He sat and scowled at her, and the old woman tried to hide more of her
protruding bones under the rag of clothing that she wore; she stood,
wriggling in evident embarrassment, well out in the sun.

“What willst thou steal of mine?” the Prince demanded suddenly.

“I am no thief.” Bright, beady eyes gleamed back at him, and gave the
lie direct to her shrinking attitude of fear. But he had taken too much
opium overnight, and was in no mood to notice little distinctions.
He was satisfied that she should seem properly afraid of him, and he
scowled angrily when one of his retainers--in slovenly undress--crossed
the courtyard to him. The man's evident intention, made obvious by his
manner and his leer at the old woman, was to say something against her;
the Prince was in a mood to quarrel with any one, on any ground at all,
who did not cower to him.

“Prince, she it is who ran ever with the white woman, as a dog runs in
the dust.”

“What does she here, then?”

“Ask her!” grinned the trooper. “Unless she comes to look for Ali
Partab, I know not.”

He made the last part of his remark in a hurried undertone, too low for
the old woman to hear.

“Let her earn her meal around the stables,” said the Prince. A sudden
light dawned on him. Here was a means, at least, of trying to make use
of Ali Partab. “Go--do thy sweeping!” he commanded, and the hag slunk
off.

For ten minutes longer, Jaimihr sat still and flicked at the stone
column with his whip,--then he sent for his master of the horse, whose
mistaken sense of loyalty had been the direct cause of Ali Partab's
capture. He had acted instantly when the fat Hindoo brought him word,
and he had expected to be praised for quick decision and rewarded; he
was plainly in high dudgeon as he swaggered out of a dark door near the
stables and advanced sulkily toward his master.

“Remove the prisoner from that cell, taking great care that the hag
yonder sees what you do--yes, that hag--the new one; she is a spy. Bring
the prisoner in to me, where I will talk with him; afterward place him
in a different cell--put him where we kept the bear that died--there is
a dark comer beside it, where a man might hide; hide a man there when
it grows dark. And give the hag access. Say nothing to her; let her come
and go as she will; watch, and listen.”

Without another word, the Prince got up and shuffled in his decorated
slippers to a door at one end of the cloister. Five minutes later Ali
Partab--high-chinned, but looking miserable--was led between two men
through the same door, while the old woman went on very ostentatiously
with her sweeping about the yard. She even turned her back, to prove how
little she was interested.

Ali Partab was hustled forward into a high-ceilinged room, whose light
came filtered through a scrollwork mesh of chiselled stone where the
wall and ceiling joined. There were no windows, but six doors opened
from it, and every one of them was barred, as though they opened into
treasure-vaults. The Prince sat restlessly in a high, carved wooden
chair; there was no other furniture at all, and Ali Partab was left
standing between his guards. The Prince drew a pistol from inside his
clothing.

“Leave us alone!” he ordered; and the guards went out, closing the door
behind them.

“I gave no orders for your capture,” said Jaimihr, with a smile.

“Then, let me go,” grinned Ali Partab.

“First, I must be informed on certain matters.”

Ali Partab still grinned, but the muscles of his face changed their
position slightly, and it took no expert in physiognomy to read that
questions he would answer must be very tactfully asked.

“Ask on!”

“You are Mahommed Gunga's man?”

“Yes. It is an honorable service.”

“Did he order you to stay here?”

“Here--in this palace? Allah forbid!”

“Did he order you to stay in Howrah?”

“He gave me certain orders. I obeyed them until your men invited swift
death for themselves and you by interfering with me!”

“What were the orders?”

Ali Partab grinned again--this time insolently.

“To make sure that the Jaimihr-sahib did not make away with the treasure
of his brother Howrah!” he answered.

“If you were released now what would you proceed to do?”

“To obey my orders.”

Jaimihr changed his tactics and assumed the frequently successful legal
line of pretending to know far more than he really did.

“I am told by one who overheard you speak that you were to take the
missionary and his daughter to Alwa's place. How much is my brother
Howrah paying for Mahommed Gunga's services in this matter? It is well
known that he and Alwa between them could call out all the Rangars in
the district for whichever side they chose. Since they are not on my
side, they must be for Howrah. How much does he pay? I might offer
more.”

“I know not,” said Ali Partab, perfectly ready to admit anything that
was not true.

“It is true, then, that Howrah has designs on the missionary's daughter?
Alwa is to keep her prisoner until the great blow is struck, and Howrah
dare take possession of her?”

“That is not my business,” answered Ali Partab, with the air of a man
who knew all of the secret details but would not admit it. Jaimihr began
to think that he had lit at random on the answer to the riddle.

“Where is Mahommed Gunga?”

“I know not.”

“At Alwa's place?”

“Am I God that I should know where any man is whom I cannot see?”

“Oh! So he is at Alwa's, eh?” That overdose of opium had rendered
Jaimihr's brain very dull indeed; he considered himself clever, and
overlooked the fact that Ali Partab would be almost surely lying to him.
In India men never tell the truth to chance-met strangers or to their
enemies; the truth is a valuable thing, to be shared cautiously among
friends.

“If Mahommed Gunga is at Alwa's,” reasoned Jaimihr, “then he is much
too close at hand to take any chances with. I must keep this man close
confined.” He raised his voice in a high-pitched command, and the guards
opened the door instantly; at a sign from the Prince they seized Ali
Partab by the wrists.

“I will send a message to Mahommed Gunga for thee,” said Jaimihr. “On
his answer will depend your release or otherwise.” He nodded. The guards
took their prisoner out between them--led him past the wrinkled old
woman in the courtyard--and halted him in a far corner, where an
evil-smelling cage of a place stood open to receive him. A moment later,
in order to make sure, the master of the horse sent for the old woman
and made her sweep out the cell a little; then he drove her away with
a fierce injunction not to let herself be caught anywhere near the cell
again unless ordered. Following the line of eastern reasoning, had he
not given that order he would not have known what her object could be
should she make her way toward the cell; but now, if she risked his
wrath by disobeying, he would know beyond the least shadow of a doubt
that she had a message to deliver to the prisoner--the man who was
hidden in the dark corner need entertain no hope of keeping the secret
to himself for purposes of sale or blackmail!

They trust each other wonderfully--with an almost childlike
confidence--in a household such as Jaimihr's!




CHAPTER XV


    Ho! I am king! All lesser fry
            Must cringe, and crawl, and cry to me,
    And none have any rights but I,--
            Except the right to lie to me.

JAIMIHR was not the only man who would have dearly liked to know of the
whereabouts of Mahommed Gunga. It had been reported to Maharajah Howrah,
by his spies, that the redoubtable ex-Risaldar of horse had visited his
relatives in Howrah City, and, though he had not been able to ascertain
a word of what had passed, he was none the less anxious.

He knew, of course--for every soul in Howrah knew--that Jaimihr was
plotting for the throne. He knew, too, that the priests o

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