“Ho!” laughed Mahommed Gunga later, as he sluiced out the cut while his own adherents stood near by and chaffed him.  “The cub cuts his teeth, then!  Soon it will be time to try his pluck.”

“Be gentle with him, risaldar-sahib; a good cub dies as easily as a poor one, until he knows the way.”

“Leave him to me!  I will show him the way, and we will see what we will see.  If he is to disgrace his father’s memory and us, he shall do it where there are few to see and none to talk of it.  When Alwa and the others ask me, as they will ask, ‘Is he a man?’ I will give them a true answer!  I think he is a man, but I need to test him in all ways possible before I pledge my word on it.”

But after that little accident the old risaldar had sword-sticks fashioned at a village near the road, and ran no more risks of being killed by the stripling he would teach; and before many more days of the road had ribboned out, young Cunningham—­bareback or from the saddle—­could beat him to the ground, and could hold his own on foot afterward with either hand.

“The hand and eye are good!” said Mahommed Gunga.  “It is time now for another test.”

So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for four days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a foul-mouthed fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads.  It was a strangely chosen place to rest at.

Deep down in a hollow, where the trunk road took advantage of a winding gorge between the hills—­screened on nearly all sides by green jungle whose brown edges wilted in the heat which the inner steam defied—­ stuffy, smelly, comfortless, it stood like a last left rear-guard of a white-man’s city, swamped by the deathless, ceaselessly advancing tide of green.  It was tucked between mammoth trees that had been left there when the space for it was cleared a hundred years before, and that now stood like grim giant guardians with arms out-stretched to hold the verdure back.

The little tribe of camp-followers chased at least a dozen snakes out of corners, and slew them in the open, as a preliminary to further investigation.  There were kas-kas mats on the foursquare floors, and each of these, when lifted, disclosed a swarm of scorpions that had to be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in.  The once white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and war to the death behind skirting boards and underneath the floor.

It had evidently not been occupied for many years; the kansamah looked like a gray-bearded skeleton compressed within a tightened shroud of parchment skin that shone where a coffin or a tomb had touched it.  He seemed to have forgotten what the bungalow was for, or that a sahib needed things to eat, until the ex-risaldar enlightened him, and then he complained wheezily.