But he rode on at his ease.  Ahead of him lay that which he considered duty.  He could feel the long-kept peace of India disintegrating all around him, and he knew—­he was certain—­as sometimes a brave man can see what cleverer men all overlook—­that the right touch by the right man at the right moment, when the last taut-held thread should break, would very likely swing the balance in favor of peace again, instead of individual self seeking anarchy.

He knew what “Cunnigan-bahadur” would have done.  He swore by Cunnigan-bahadur.  And the memory of that same dead, desperately honest Cunningham he swore that no personal profit or convenience or safety should be allowed to stand between him and what was honorable and right!  Mahommed Gunga had no secrets from himself; nor lack of imagination.  He knew that he was riding—­not to preserve the peace of India, for that was as good as gone—­but to make possible the winning back of it.  And he rode with a smile on his thin lips, as the crusaders once rode on a less self-advertising errand.

CHAPTER IV

    “You have failed!” whispered Fate, and a weary civilian
    Threw up his task as a matter of course. 
    “Failed?” said the soldier.  He knew a million
    Chances untackled yet.  “Get me a horse!”

That was a strange ride of Mahommed Gunga’s, and a fateful one—­more full of portent for the British Raj in India than he, or the British, 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.