so."

"Sahib, it is! These damned new cartridges and this new drill-sahib,
I--I who am loyal to the marrow of my bones--would no more touch those
cartridges--nor bite them, as the drill decrees--than I would betray
thee! Pig's fat! Ugh!"

He spat with Mohammedan eloquence and wiped his lips on his tunic sleeve
before resuming.

"Then, like a flint and steel, to light the train that they have laid,
they loose these missionaries, in a swarm, from one end of India to the
other. Why? What say one and all? Mohammedan and Hindoo both say it is a
plot, first to make them lose their own religion by defilement, then
to make Christians of them! Foolishness to talk thus? Nay! It was
foolishness to act thus!

"Sahib, peace follows in the wake of soldiers, as we know. Time and time
again the peace of India has been ripped asunder at the whim of priests!
These padre people, preaching new damnation everywhere, are the flint
and steel for the tinder of the cartridge fat!"

"I never knew you to croak before, Mahommed Gunga."

"Nor am I croaking. I am praising Allah, who has sent thee now to the
place whence the wind will come to fan the hell flames that presently
will burn. The wind will blow hot or cold--for or against the
government--according as you and I and certain others act when
opportunity arrives! See yonder!"

They had been seen, evidently, for horsemen--looking like black ants on
the desert--seemed to have crawled from the bowels of the living rock
and were galloping in their direction.

"Friends?" asked Cunningham.

"Friends, indeed! But they have yet to discover whether we are friends.
They set me thinking, sahib. Alwa is well known on this country-side and
none dare raid his place; few would waste time trying. Therefore, it is
all one to him who passes along this road; and he takes no trouble, as
a rule, to send his men out in skirmishing order when a party comes in
view. Why, then, does he trouble now?"

"Couldn't say. I don't know Alwa."

"I am thinking, sahib, that the cloud has burst at last! A blood-red
cloud! Alwa is neither scare-monger nor robber; when he sends out armed
men to inspect strangers on the sky-line, there is war! Sahib, I grow
young again! Had people listened to me--had they called me anything but
fool when I warned them--thou and I would have been cooped up now in
Agra, or in Delhi, or Lucknow, or Peshawur! Now we are free of the
plains of Rajputana--within a ride of fifty of my blood-re