Nobody seemed to be for India, except Mahommed Gunga; and he said little, but asked ever-repeated questions as he rode.  There were men who would like to weld Rajputana into one again, and over-ride the rest of India; and there were other men who planned to do the same for the Punjaub; there were plots within plots, not many of which he learned in anything like detail, but none of which were more than skin-deep below the surface.  All men looked to the sudden, swift, easy whelming of the British Raj, and then to the plundering of India; each man expected to be rich when the whelming came, and each man waited with ill-controlled impatience for the priests’ word that would let loose the hundred-million flood of anarchy.

“And one man—­one real man whom they trusted—­one leader—­one man who had one thousand at his back—­could change the whole face of things!” he muttered to himself.  “Would God there we a Cunnigan!  But there is no Cunnigan.  And who would follow me?  They would pull my beard, tell me I was scheming for my own ends!—­I, who was taught by Cunnigan, and would serve only India!”

He would ride before dawn and when the evening breeze had come to cool the hot earth a little through the blazing afternoons he would lie in the place of honor by some open window, where he could watch a hireling flick the flies off his lean, road-hardened horse, and listen to the plotting and the carried tales of plots, pretending always to be sympathetic or else open to conviction.

“A soldier?  Hah!  A soldier fights for the side that can best reward him!” he would grin.  “And, when there is no side, perhaps he makes one!  I am a soldier!”

If they pressed him, he would point to his medal ribbons, that he always wore.  “The British gave me those for fighting against the northern tribes beyond the Himalayas,” he would tell them.  “The southern tribes—­Bengalis of the south and east—­would give better picking than mere medal ribbons!”

They were not all sure of him.  They were not all satisfied why he should ride on to Peshawur, and decline to stay with them and talk good sedition.

“I would see how the British are!” he told them.  And he told the truth.  But they were not quite satisfied; he would have made a splendid leader to have kept among them, until he—­too—­became too powerful and would have to be deposed in turn.

His own holding was a long way from Peshawur, and he was no rich man who could afford at a mere whim to ride two long days’ march beyond his goal.  Nor was he, as he had explained to Miss McClean, a letter-carrier; he would get no more than the merest thanks for delivering her letters to where they could be included in the Government mail-bag.  Yet he left the road that would have led him homeward to his left, and carried on—­quickening his pace as he neared the frontier garrison town, and wasting, then, no time at all on seeking information.  Nobody supposed that the Pathans and the other frontier tribes were anything but openly rebellious, and he would have been an idiot to ask questions about their loyalty.