Rung Ho! Part 5

"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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude of pleasure at the prospect without seeming to flaunt his better fortune.

Mahommed Gunga interlarded his hoa.r.s.e 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 s.p.a.ce 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 coa.r.s.e, 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.