Now, there was nothing much the matter with the men on either side, taken in the main, who hated one another on that far-pushed frontier.  Even the insufferable incompetents who held the rotting reins of control were such because circumstance had blinded them.  There was not a man among the highly placed ones even who would have deliberately placed his own importance or his own opinion in the scale against India’s welfare.  There was not a border thief but was ready to respect what he could recognize as strong-armed justice.

The root of the trouble lay in centralization of authority, and rigid adherence to the rule of seniority.  Combined, these two processes had served to bring about a state of things that is nearly unbelievable when viewed in the light of modern love for efficiency.  Young men, with the fire of ambition burning in them and a proper scorn for mere superficial ceremony, had to sweat their tempers and bow down beneath the yoke of senile pompousness.

Strong, savage, powder-weaned Hill-tribesmen—­inheritors of egoistic independence and a love of loot—­laughed loud and long and openly at System that prevented officers from taking arms against them until authority could come by delegate from somebody who slept.  By that time they would be across the border, quarrelling among themselves about division of the plunder!

They had respect in plenty for the youth and virile middle age that dealt with them on the rare occasions when a timely blow was loosed.  Then they had proof that from that strange, mad country overseas there came men who could lead men—­men who could strike, and who knew enough to hold their hands when the sudden blow had told—­just men, who could keep their plighted word.  No border thief pretended that the British could not rule him; to a man, they laughed because the possible was not imposed.  And to the last bold, ruffianly iconoclast they stole when, where, and what they dared.

Things altered strangely soon after Ralph Cunningham, with the diffidence of youth but the blood of a line of soldiers leaping in him, took charge of his tiny force of nondescripts.  They were neither soldiers nor police.  Nominally, he was everybody’s dog, and so were they; actually he found himself at the head of a tiny department of his own, because it was nobody’s affair to give him orders.  They had deliberately turned him loose “to hang himself,” and their hope that he might get his head into a noose of trouble as soon as possible—­the very liberty they gave him, on purpose for his quick damnation—­was the means of making reputation for him.