But the leaping red blood of youth ran strong in him.  He had imagination.  He could dream.  The good things he was tasting were a presage only of the better things to come, and that is a wholesome point of view.  He was proud—­as who would not be?—­to step straight into the tracks of such a father; and with that thought came another—­just as good for him, and for India, that made him feel as though he were a robber yet, a thief in another’s cornfield, gathering what he did not sow.  It came over him in a flood that he must pay the price of all this homage.

Some men pay in advance, some at the time, and some pay afterward.  All men, he knew, must pay.  It would be his task soon to satisfy these gentle-men, who took him at his face value, by proving to them that they had made no very great mistake.  The thought thrilled him instead of frightening—­brought out every generous instinct that he had and made him thank the God of All Good Soldiers that at least he would have a chance to die in the attempt.  There was nothing much the matter with young Cunningham.

CHAPTER VI

I take no man at rumor’s price,
Nor as the gossips cry him. 
A son may ride, and stride, and stand;
His father’s eye—­his father’s hand—­
His father’s tongue may give command;
But ere I trust I’ll try him!

But before young Cunningham was called upon to pay even a portion of the price of fealty there was more of the receiving of it still in store for him, and he found himself very hard put to it, indeed, to keep overboiling spirits from becoming exultation of the type that nauseates.

None of the other subalterns had influence, nor had they hereditary anchors in the far northwest that would be likely to draw them on to active service early in their career.  They had already been made to surrender their boyhood dreams of quick promotion; now, standing in little groups and asking hesitating questions, they discovered that their destination—­Fort William—­was about the least desirable of all the awful holes in India.

They were told that a subaltern was lucky who could mount one step of the promotion ladder in his first ten years; that a major at fifty, a colonel at sixty, and a general at seventy were quite the usual thing.  And they realized that the pay they would receive would be a mere beggar’s pittance in a neighborhood so expensive as Calcutta, and that their little private means would be eaten up by the mere, necessities of life.  They showed their chagrin and it was not very easy for young Cunningham, watching Mahommed Gunga’s lordly preparations for the long up-country journey, to strike just the right attitude of pleasure at the prospect without seeming to flaunt his better fortune.