or the men amid whose homes he rode could ever have anticipated. He
averaged a little less than twenty miles a day, and through an Indian
hot-weather, and with no spare horse, none but a born horseman--a man
of light weight and absolute control of temper--could have
accomplished that for thirty days on end.

Wherever he rode there was the same unrest. Here and there were new
complaints he had not yet heard of, imaginary some of them, and some
only too well founded. Wherever there were Rajputs--and that race of
fighting men is scattered all about the north--there was
ill-suppressed impatience for the bursting of the wrath to come. They
bore no grudge against the English, but they did bear more than grudge
against the money-lenders and the fat, litigious traders who had
fattened under British rule. At least at the beginning it was evident
that all the interest of all the Rajputs lay in letting the British get
the worst of it; even should the British suddenly wake up and look
about them and take steps--or should the British hold their own with
native aid, and so save India from anarchy, and afterward reward the
men who helped--the Rajputs would stand to gain less individually, or
even collectively, than if they let the English be driven to the sea,
and then reverted to the age-old state of feudal lawlessness that once
had made them rich.

Many of the Hindoo element among them were almost openly disloyal. The
ryots--the little one and two acre farmers--were the least
unsettled; they, when he asked them--and he asked often--
disclaimed the least desire to change a rule that gave them safe
holdings and but one tax-collection a year; they were frankly for
their individual selves--not even for one another, for the ryots as a
class.