man
came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.

Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still
sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him,
until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his
voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at
least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the
light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.

"Look, Cunningham-sahib!"

The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light,
to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side, in
curves, across the stone; but it was too dark--the light was too fitful;
the marks themselves were too faint from the constant squatting of
roadside wanderers.

Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant
took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig
hurriedly, scratching and scraping at what presently showed, even in
that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering. Soon Cunningham
himself began to lend a hand. He made out a date first, and he could
feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it. Gradually,
letter by letter--word by word--he read it off, feeling a strange new
thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from the
haunted past.

A.D. 1823. A.D.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM
WHO DIED ON THIS SPOT
AETAT 81
FROM
WOUNDS INFLICTED BY A
TIGER

There was no sound audible except the purring of the lamp flame and
the heavy breathing of the three as Cunningham gazed down at the very
crudely carved, stained, often-desecrated slab below which lay the first
of the Anglo-Indian Cunninghams.

This man--these crumbled bones that lay under a forgotten piece of
rock--had made all of their share of history. They had begotten "Pukka"
Cunningham, who had hacked the name deeper yet in the crisscrossed
annals of a land of war. It was strange--it was queer--uncanny--for the
third of the Cunninghams to be sitting on the stone. It was unexpected,
yet it seemed to have a place in the scheme of things, for he caught
himself searching his memory backward.

He received an impression that something was expected of him. He knew,
by instinct and reasoning he could not have explained, that neither
Mahomme