athering, 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; e