He let me stand three minutes, reading my eyes through the darkness, before he motioned me to sit.  So then we sat facing, I on one side of the fire and he the other.

“I have watched you, Hira Singh,” he said at last.  “Now and again I have seemed to see a proper spirit in you.  Nay, words are but fragments of the wind!” said he. (I had begun to make him protestations.) “There are words tossing back and forth below,” he said, looking past me down into the hollow, where shadows of men were, and now and then the eye of a horse would glint in firelight.  Then he said quietly, “The spirit of a Sikh requires deeds of us.”

“Deeds in the dark?” said I, for I hoped to learn more of what was in his mind.

“Should a Sikh’s heart fail him in the dark?” he asked.

“Have I failed you,” said I, “since you came to us in the prison camp?”

“Who am I?” said he, and I did not answer, for I wondered what he meant.  He said no more for a minute or two, but listened to our pickets calling their numbers one to another in the dark above us.

“If you serve me,” he said at last, “how are you better than the stable-helper in cantonments who groomed my horse well for his own belly’s sake?  I can give you a full belly, but your honor is your own.  How shall I know your heart?”

I thought for a long while, looking up at the stars.  He was not impatient, so I took time and considered well, understanding him now, but pained that he should care nothing for my admiration.

“Sahib,” I said finally, “by this oath you shall know my heart.  Should I ever doubt you, I will tear out your heart and lay it on a dung-hill.”

“Good!” said he.  But I remember he made me no threat in return, so that even to this day I wonder how my words sounded in his ears.  I am left wondering whether I was man enough to dare swear such an oath.  If he had sworn me a threat in return I should have felt more at ease—­more like his equal.  But who would have gained by that?  My heart and my belly are not one.  Self-satisfaction would not have helped.

“Soon,” he said, looking into my eyes beside the fire, “we shall meet opportunities for looting.  Yet we have food enough for men and mules and horses for many a day to come; and as the corn grows less more men can ride in the carts, so that we shall move the swifter.  But now this map of mine grows vague and our road leads more and more into the unknown.  We need eyes ahead of us.  I can control the men if I stay with them, but in that case who shall ride on and procure intelligence?”

In a flash I saw his meaning.  There was none but he wise enough to ride ahead.  But who else could control the men—­men who believed they had sloughed the regiment’s honor in a Flanders trench and a German prison camp?  They were sloughing their personal honor that minute, fraternizing with Turkish prisoners.  With their sense of honor gone, could even Ranjoor Singh control them?  Perhaps!  But if Ranjoor Singh rode forward, who should stay behind and stand in his shoes?