Rung Ho! A Novel. Talbot Mundy

our road at last.

       I choose the RIGHT! Who follows?

      HEMMED in amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary, secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga—all six, according to their turbans, followers of Islam—discussed matters that appeared to bring them little satisfaction.

      They sat together in a dark, low-ceilinged room; its open door—it was far too hot to close anything that admitted air—gave straight onto the street, and the one big window opened on a courtyard, where a pair of game-cocks fought in and out between the restless legs of horses, while a yelling horde betted on them. On a heap of grass fodder in a corner of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony thumped a skin tom-tom with his knuckles, while at his feet the own-blood brother to the screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a wind instrument.

      Din—glamour—stink—incessant movement—interblended poverty and riches rubbing shoulders—noisy self-interest side by side with introspective revery, where stray priests nodded in among the traders,—many-peopled India surged in miniature between the four hot walls and through the passage to the overflowing street; changeable and unexplainable, in ever-moving flux, but more conservative in spite of it than the very rocks she rests on—India who is sister to Aholibah and mother of all fascination.

      In that room with the long window, low-growled, the one thin thread of clear-sighted unselfishness was reeling out to very slight approval. Mahommed Gunga paced the floor and kicked his toes against the walls, as he turned at either end, until his spurs jingled, and looked with blazing dark-brown eyes from one man to the other.

      “What good ever came of listening to priests?” he asked. “All priests are alike—ours, and theirs, and padre-sahibs! They all preach peace and goad the lust that breeds war and massacre! Does a priest serve any but himself? Since when? There will come this rising that the priests speak of—yes! Of a truth, there will, for the priests will see to it! There is a padre-sahib here in Howrah now for the Hindoo priests to whet their hate on. You saw the woman ride past here a half-hour gone? There is a pile of tinder ready here, and any fool of a priest can make a spark! There will be a rising, and a big one!”

      “There will! Of a truth, there will!” Alwa, his cousin, crossed one leg above the other with a clink of spurs and scabbard. He had no objection to betraying interest, but declined for the present to betray his hand.

      “There will be a blood-letting that will do no harm to us Rajputs!” said another man, whose eyes gleamed from the darkest corner; he, too, clanked his scabbard as though the sound were an obbligato to his thoughts. “Sit still and say nothing is my advice; we will be all ready to help ourselves when the hour comes!”

      “It is this way,” said Mahommed Gunga, standing straddle-legged to face all five of them, with his back to the window. He stroked his black beard upward with one hand and fingered with the other at his sabre-hilt. “Without aid when the hour does come, the English will be smashed—worn down—starved out—surrounded—stamped out—annihilated—so!” He stamped with his heel descriptively on the hard earth floor. “And then, what?”

      “Then, the plunder!” said Alwa, showing a double row of wonderful white teeth. The other four grinned like his reflections. “Ay, there will be plunder—for the priests! And we Rajputs will have new masters over us! Now, as things are, we have honorable men. They are fools, for any man is a fool who will not see and understand the signs. But they are honest. They ride straight! They look us straight between the eyes, and speak truth, and fear nobody! Will the Hindoo priests, who will rule India afterward, be thus? Nay! Here is one sword for the British when the hour comes!”

      “I have yet to see a Hindoo priest rule me or plunder me!” said Alwa with a grin.

      “You will live to see it!” said Mahommed Gunga. “Truly, you will live to see it, unless you throw your weight into the other scale! What are we Rajputs without a leader whom we all trust? What have we ever been?” He swung on his heels suddenly—angrily—and began to pace the floor again—then stopped.

      “Divided, and again subdivided—one-fifth Mohammedan and four-fifths Hindoo—clan within clan, and each against the other. Do we own Rajputana? Nay! Do we rule it? Nay! What were we until Cunnigan-bahadur came?”

      “Ah!” All five men rose with a clank in honor to the memory of that man. “Cunnigan-bahadur! Show us such another man as he was, and I and mine ride at his back!” said Alwa. “Not all the English are like Cunnigan! A Cunnigan could have five thousand men the minute that he asked for them!”

      “Am I a wizard?—Can I cast spells and bring dead men's spirits from the dead again? I know of no man to take his place,” said Mahommed Gunga sadly.

      He was the poorest of them, but they were all, comparatively speaking, poor men; for the long peace had told its tale on a race of men who are first gentlemen, then soldiers, and last—least of all—and only as a last resource, landed proprietors. The British, for whom they had often fought because that way honor seemed to lie, had impoverished them afterward by passing and enforcing zemindary laws that lifted nine-tenths of the burden from the necks of starving tenants. The new law was just, as the Rajputs grudgingly admitted, but it pinched their pockets sadly; like the old-time English squires, they would give their best blood and their last rack-rent-wrung rupee for the cause that they believed in, but they resented interference with the rack-rents! Mahommed Gunga had had influence enough with these five landlord relations of his to persuade them to come and meet him in Howrah City to discuss matters; the mere fact that he had thought it worth his while to leave his own little holding in the north had satisfied them that he would be well worth listening to—for no man rode six hundred miles on an empty errand. But they needed something more than words before they pledged the word that no Rajput gentleman will ever break.

      “Find us a Cunnigan—bring him to us—prove him to us—and if a blade worth having from end to end of Rajputana is not at his service, I myself will gut the Hindoo owner of it! That is my given word!” said Alwa.

      “He had a son,” said Mahommed Gunga quietly.

      “True. Are all sons like their fathers? Take Maharajah Howrah here; his father was a man with whom any soldier might be proud to pick a quarrel. The present man is afraid of his own shadow on the wall—divided between love for the treasure-chests he dare not broach and fear of a brother whom he dare not kill. He is priest-ridden, priest-taught, and fit to be nothing but a priest. Who knows how young Cunnigan will shape? Where is he? Overseas yet! He must prove himself, as his father did, before he can hope to lead a free regiment of horse!”

      “Then Cunnigan-bahadur's watch-word 'For the peace of India,' is dead-died with him?” asked Mahommed Gunga. “We are each for our own again?”

      “I have spoken!” answered Alwa. As the biggest clan-chief left on all that countryside, he had a right to speak before the others, and he knew that what he said would carry weight when they had all ridden home again, and the report had gone abroad in ever-widening rings. “If the English can hold India, let them! I will not fight against them, for they are honest men for all their madness. If they cannot, then I am for Rajputana, not India—India may burn or rot or burst to pieces, so long as Rajputana stands! But—” He paused a moment, and looked at each man in turn, and tapped his sabre-hilt, “—if a Cunnigan-bahadur were among us—a man whom I could trust to lead me and mine and every man—I would lend him my sword for the sheer honor of helping him hack truth out of corruption! I have nothing more to say!”

      “One word more, cousin!” said Mahommed Gunga. “I was risaldar in Cunnigan-bahadur's regiment of horse. There was more than mere discipline between us. I ate his salt. Once—when he might have saved himself the trouble without any daring to reproach him—he risked his own life, and a troop, and his reputation to save a woman of my family from capture, and something worse. There was never a Rajput or any other native woman wronged while he was with us.”

      “Well?”

      “I am no friend of Christian priests—of padres. But—”