possible before I pledge my word on it."

But after that little accident the old risaldar had sword-sticks
fashioned at a village near the road, and ran no more risks of being
killed by the stripling he would teach; and before many more days of
the road had ribboned out, young Cunningham--bareback or from the
saddle--could beat him to the ground, and could hold his own on foot
afterward with either hand.

"The hand and eye are good!" said Mahommed Gunga. "It is time now for
another test."

So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for
four days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a
foul-mouthed fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads. It was a
strangely chosen place to rest at.

Deep down in a hollow, where the trunk road took advantage of a winding
gorge between the hills--screened on nearly all sides by green jungle
whose brown edges wilted in the heat which the inner steam defied--
stuffy, smelly, comfortless, it stood like a last left rear-guard of a
white-man's city, swamped by the deathless, ceaselessly advancing tide
of green. It was tucked between mammoth trees that had been left there
when the space for it was cleared a hundred years before, and that now
stood like grim giant guardians with arms out-stretched to hold the
verdure back.

The little tribe of camp-followers chased at least a dozen snakes out
of corners, and slew them in the open, as a preliminary to further
investigation. There were kas-kas mats on the foursquare floors, and