ven 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 soldie