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 God 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.

CHAP