RUNG HO!
A Novel by Talbot Mundy



RUNG HO!

CHAPTER I

Howrah City bows the knee
More or less to masters three,
King, and Prince, and Siva.
Howrah City pays in pain
Taxes which the royal twain
Give to priests, to give again
(More or less) to Siva.

THAT was no time or place for any girl of twenty to be wandering
unprotected. Rosemary McClean knew it; the old woman, of the sweeper
caste, that is no caste at all,--the hag with the flat breasts and
wrinkled skin, who followed her dogwise, and was no more protection
than a toothless dog,--knew it well, and growled about it in
incessant undertones that met with neither comment nor response.

"Leave a pearl of price to glisten on the street, yes!" she grumbled.
"Perhaps none might notice it--perhaps! But her--here--at this
time--" She would continue in a rumbling growl of half-prophetic
catalogues of evil--some that she had seen to happen, some that she
imagined, and not any part of which was in the least improbable.