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.