t much changed since he had been sent to England, a child,
fifteen years ago.

There were a few new buildings, but the air and the smell and the
sunshine were the same; and the little green men who crossed the
parade-ground looked very familiar. Three weeks ago John Chinn would
have said he did not remember a word of the Bhil tongue, but at the
mess door he found his lips moving in sentences that he did not
understand--bits of old nursery rhymes, and tail-ends of such orders as
his father used to give the men.

The Colonel watched him come up the steps, and laughed.

"Look!" he said to the Major. "No need to ask the young un's breed. He's
a pukka Chinn. 'Might be his father in the Fifties over again."

"'Hope he'll shoot as straight," said the Major. "He's brought enough
ironmongery with him."

"'Wouldn't be a Chinn if he didn't. Watch him blowin' his nose. 'Regular
Chinn beak. 'Flourishes his handkerchief like his father. It's the
second edition--line for line."

"'Fairy tale, by Jove!" said the Major, peering through the slats of the
jalousies. "If he's the lawful heir, he'll.... Now old Chinn could no
more pass that chick without fiddling with it than...."

"His son!" said the Colonel, jumping up.

"Well, I be blowed!" said the Major. The boy's eye had been caught by a
split-reed screen that hung on a slew between the veranda pillars, and,
mechanically, he had tweaked the edge to set it level. Old Chinn had
sworn three times a day at that screen for many years; he could never
get it to his satisfaction.

His son entered the anteroom in the middle of a fivefold silence. They
made him welcome for his father's sake and, as they took stock of him,
for his own. He was ridiculously like the portrait of the Colonel on
the wall, and when he had washed a little of the dust from his throat he
went to his quarters with the old man's short, noiseless jungle-step.

"So much for heredity," said the Major. "That comes of four generations
among the Bhils."

"And the men know it," said a Wing officer. "They've been waiting for
this youth with their tongues hanging out. I am persuaded that, unless
he absolutely beats 'em over the head, they'll lie down by companies and
worship him."

"Nothin' like havin' a father before you," said the Major. "I'm a
parvenu with my chaps. I've only been twenty years in the regiment,
and my revered parent he was a simple squire. There's no getting at
the bottom of a Bhil's mind. Now, why