"One month--six months--a year--who knows? Until the hag summons
thee, or I, by writing or by word of mouth, relieve thee of thy trust."

At sunset he sent the squire to Miss McClean for the letters he had
promised to deliver; and at one hour after sunset, when the heat of
the earth had begun to rise and throw back a hot blast to the darkened
sky and the little eddies of luke-warm surface wind made movement for
horse and man less like a fight with scorching death, he rode off, with
his new servant, on the two horses left to him of the five with which
he came.

A six-hundred-mile ride without spare horses, in the heat of northern
India, was an undertaking to have made any strong man flinch. The
stronger the man, and the more soldierly, the better able he would be
to realize the effort it would call for. But Mahommed Gunga rode as
though he were starting on a visit to a near-by friend; he was not
given to crossing bridges before he reached them, nor to letting
prospects influence his peace of mind. He was a soldier. He took
precautions first, when and where such were possible, then rode and
looked fate in the eye.

He appeared to take no more notice of the glowering looks that followed
him from stuffy balconies and dense-packed corners than of the
mosquitoes to and the heat. Without hurry he picked his way through
the thronged streets, where already men lay in thousands to escape the
breathlessness of walled interiors; the gutters seemed like trenches
where the dead of a devastated city had been laid; the murmur was like
the voice of storm-winds gathering, and the little lights along the
housetops were for the vent-holes on the lid of a tormented underworld.