The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rung Ho!, by Talbot Mundy

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Title: Rung Ho!

Author: Talbot Mundy

Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5153]
Posting Date: June 2, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUNG HO! ***

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