“I don’t place Sergeant Brown under your command—­you’ll understand that’s impossible—­but, it’s quite impossible for him to catch me up.  He may as well cooperate with you.  Wait.”  He paused, and wrote, then continued, “Here is a note to him, in which I order him to work with you, and to take your advice whenever possible.  Go to the stables, and choose any horse you like except my first charger.  Here—­here is money; you may need some.  Count that, will you.  How much is it?  Four hundred rupees?  Write out a receipt for it.  Now, good luck to you, Juggut Khan.  And if you should get through alive—­I’ll pay you the compliment of admitting that you won’t come through without the women, and I know that Brown won’t—­if you should have luck, and should happen to get through, why, look for me at Harumpore, or elsewhere to the northward of it.  I start with my division in an hour.”

“Salaam, sahib!” said Rajput, rising and standing at the salute.

“Salaam, Juggut Khan!  Take any food, or drink, or clothing that you want.  Good-by, and your good luck ride with you.  I feel like a murderer, but I know I’ve done the best that can be done!”

VI.

Now if Sergeant Brown possessed a sweetheart, and the sweetheart lived in England, and if Brown still loved her—­as has already been more than hinted at—­it is not at all unreasonable to wonder why he had no likeness of her, no news of her, nothing but her memory around which to weave the woof of sentiment—­at least, it’s not unreasonable so to wonder in this late year of grace.

Then, though, in 1857, when a newspaper cost threepence or thereabouts, and schools were so far from being free that only the sons of gentlemen (and seldom the daughters of even gentlemen, remember) attended them, the art of reading was not so common as it now is.  Writing was still more uncommon.  And it has not been pretended that Brown was other than a commoner.  He was a stiff-backed man, and honest.  And the pride that had raised him to the rank of sergeant was even stiffer than his stock.  But he came from the ranks that owned no vote, nor little else, in those days, and he owned a sweetheart of the same rank as himself, who could neither read nor write.  And when people whose somewhat primitive ideas on right and wrong lead them to look on daguerreotypes as works of the devil happen too to be living more than five thousand miles apart, when one of the two can not write, nor readily afford the cost of postage, and when the other is nearly always on the move from post to post, it is not exactly to be wondered at that memory of each other was all they had to dwell upon.

A journey to India in ’57 meant, to the rank and file, oblivion and worse.  There were men then, of course, just as there are now, who would leave a girl behind them tied fast by a promise of futile and endless devotion; men who knew what the girls did not know—­that India was all but inaccessible to any one outside of government employ, and that a common soldier’s chance of sending for his girl, or of coming home again to claim her, was something in the neighborhood of one in thirty thousand.