RUNG HO!

CHAPTER I

Howrah City bows the knee
More or less to masters three,
King, and Prince, and Siva. 
Howrah City pays in pain
Taxes which the royal twain
Give to priests, to give again
(More or less) to Siva.

That was no time or place for any girl of twenty to be wandering unprotected.  Rosemary McClean knew it; the old woman, of the sweeper caste, that is no caste at all,—­the hag with the flat breasts and wrinkled skin, who followed her dogwise, and was no more protection than a toothless dog,—­knew it well, and growled about it in incessant undertones that met with neither comment nor response.

“Leave a pearl of price to glisten on the street, yes!” she grumbled.  “Perhaps none might notice it—­perhaps!  But her—­here—­at this time—­” She would continue in a rumbling growl of half-prophetic catalogues of evil—­some that she had seen to happen, some that she imagined, and not any part of which was in the least improbable.

As the girl passed through the stenching, many-hued bazaar, the roar would cease for a second and then rise again.  Turbaned and pugreed—­ Mohammedan and Hindoo—­men of all grades of color, language, and belief, but with only one theory on women, would stare first at the pony that she rode, then at her, and then at the ancient grandmother who trotted in her wake.  Low jests would greet the grandmother, and then the trading and the gambling would resume, together with the under-thread of restlessness that was so evidently there and yet so hard to lay a finger on.

The sun beat down pitilessly—­brass—­like the din of cymbals.  Beneath the sun helmet that sat so squarely and straightforwardly on the tidy chestnut curls, her face was pale.  She smiled as she guided her pony in and out amid the roaring throng, and carefully refused to see the scowls, her brave little shoulders seconded a pair of quiet, brave gray eyes in showing an unconquerable courage to the world, and her clean, neat cotton riding-habit gave the lie and the laugh in one to poverty; but, as the crowd had its atmosphere of secret murmuring, she had another of secret anxiety.

Neither had fear.  She did not believe in it.  She was there to help her father fight inhuman wrong, and die, if need be, in the last ditch.  The crowd had none, for it had begun to realize that it was part a of a two-hundred-million crowd, held down and compelled by less than a hundred thousand aliens.  And, least of all, had the man who followed her at a little distance the slightest sense of fear.  He was far more conversant with it than she, but—­unlike her, and far more than the seething crowd—­he knew the trend of events, and just what likelihood there was of insult or injury to Rosemary McClean being avenged in a generation.