left a stone unturned to make Cunningham believe himself much more than
ordinary clay. All along the trunk road, that trails by many thousand
towns and listens to a hundred languages, whatever good there was was
Cunningham's. Whichever room was best in each dak-bungalow, whichever
chicken the kansamah least desired to kill, whoever were the stoutest
dhoolee-bearers in the village, whichever horse had the easiest paces
--all were Cunningham's. Respect were his, and homage and obeisance,
for the Rajput saw to it.

Of evenings, while they rested, but before the sun went down, the old
risaldar would come with his naked sabre and defy "Chota" Cunnigan to
try to touch him. For five long weeks he tried each evening, the
Rajput never doing anything but parry,--changing his sabre often to
the other hand and grinning at the schoolboy swordsmanship--until one
evening, at the end of a more than usually hard-fought bout, the
youngster pricked him, lunged, and missed slitting his jugular by the
merest fraction of an inch.

"Ho!" laughed Mahommed Gunga later, as he sluiced out the cut while his
own adherents stood near by and chaffed him. "The cub cuts his teeth,
then! Soon it will be time to try his pluck."

"Be gentle with him, risaldar-sahib; a good cub dies as easily as a
poor one, until he knows the way."

"Leave him to me! I will show him the way, and we will see what we
will see. If he is to disgrace his father's memory and us, he shall do
it where there are few to see and none to talk of it. When Alwa and
the others ask me, as they will ask, 'Is he a man?' I will give them a
true answer! I think he is a man, but I need to test him in all ways