Rung Ho! A Novel, Talbot Mundy [free ebook reader for ipad .txt] 📗

“There is one way in which you could help me almost at once, Mahommed Gunga,” he answered.

“Command me, sahib.”

“I need your advice—the advice of a man who really knows. I need horses, and—at first at least—I would rather trust your judgment than my own. Will you help me buy them?”

The Raiput's eyes blazed pleasure. On war, and wine, and women, and a horse are the four points to ask a man's advice and win his approval by the asking.

“Nay, sahib; why buy horses here? These Bombay traders have only crows' meat to sell to the ill-advised. I have horses, and spare horses for the journey; and in Rajputana I have horses waiting for thee—seven, all told—sufficient for a young officer. Six of them are country-bred-sand-weaned—a little wild perhaps, but strong, and up to thy weight. The seventh is a mare, got by thy father's stallion Aga Khan (him that made more than a hundred miles within a day under a fifteen-stone burden, with neither food nor water, and survived!). A good mare, sahib—indeed a mare of mares—fit for thy father's son. That mare I give thee. It is little, sahib, but my best; I am a poor man. The other six I bought—there is the account. I bought them cheaply, paying less than half the price demanded in each case—but I had to borrow and must pay back.”

Young Cunningham was hard put to it to keep his voice steady as he answered. This man was a stranger to him. He had a hazy recollection of a dozen or more bearded giants who formed a moving background to his dreams of infancy, and he had expected some sort of welcome from one or two perhaps, of his father's men when he reached the north. But to have men borrow money that they might serve him, and have horses ready for him, and to be met like this at the gate of India by a man who admitted he was poor, was a little more than his self-control had been trained as yet to stand.

“I won't waste words, Mahommed Gunga,” he said, half-choking. “I'll—er—I'll try to prove how I feel about it.”

“Ha! How said I? Thy father's son, I said! He, too, was no believer in much promising! I was his servant, and will serve him still by serving thee. The honor is mine, sahib, and the advantage shall be where thy father wished it.”

“My father would never have had me—”

“Sahib, forgive the interruption, but a mistake is better checked. Thy father would have flung thee ungrudged, into a hell of bayonets, me, too, and would have followed after, if by so doing he could have served the cause he held in trust. He bred thee, fed thee, and sent thee oversea to grow, that in the end India might gain! Thou and I are but servants of the peace, as he was. If I serve thee, and thou the Raj—though the two of us were weaned on the milk of war and get our bread by war—we will none the less serve peace! Aie! For what is honor if a soldier lets it rust? Of what use is service, mouthed and ready, 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.