“Can he fight?”

“He slew the man with his bare hands who pricked his eye out with a sword.”

“Oh!  What payment does he ask?”

“He leaves that matter to your honor’s pleasure.”

“Good.  Instruct him, then.  Set him to cleaning my horse and then return here.”

The squire was back again within five minutes and stood before Mahommed Gunga in silent expectation.

“I shall miss thee,” said Mahommed Gunga after five minutes’ reflection.  “It is well that I have other servants in the north.”

“In what have I offended, sahib?”

“In nothing.  Therefore there is a trust imposed.”

The man salaamed.  Mahommed Gunga produced his little handful of gold mohurs and divided it into two equal portions; one he handed to the squire.

“Stay here.  Be always either in the caravansary or else at call.  Should the old woman who serves Miss Maklin-sahib, the padre-sahib’s daughter come and ask thy aid, then saddle swiftly the three horses I will leave with thee, and bear Miss Maklin-sahib and her father to my cousin Alwa’s place.  Present two of the gold mohurs to the hag, should that happen.”

“But sahib—­two mohurs?  I could buy ten such hags outright for the price!”

“She has my word in the matter!  It is best to have her eager to win great reward.  The hag will stay awake, but see to it that thou sleepest not!”

“And for how long must I stay here, sahib?”

“One month—­six months—­a year—­who knows?  Until the hag summons thee, or I, by writing or by word of mouth, relieve thee of thy trust.”

At sunset he sent the squire to Miss McClean for the letters he had promised to deliver; and at one hour after sunset, when the heat of the earth had begun to rise and throw back a hot blast to the darkened sky and the little eddies of luke-warm surface wind made movement for horse and man less like a fight with scorching death, he rode off, with his new servant, on the two horses left to him of the five with which he came.

A six-hundred-mile ride without spare horses, in the heat of northern India, was an undertaking to have made any strong man flinch.  The stronger the man, and the more soldierly, the better able he would be to realize the effort it would call for.  But Mahommed Gunga rode as though he were starting on a visit to a near-by friend; he was not given to crossing bridges before he reached them, nor to letting prospects influence his peace of mind.  He was a soldier.  He took precautions first, when and where such were possible, then rode and looked fate in the eye.

He appeared to take no more notice of the glowering looks that followed him from stuffy balconies and dense-packed corners than of the mosquitoes to and the heat.  Without hurry he picked his way through the thronged streets, where already men lay in thousands to escape the breathlessness of walled interiors; the gutters seemed like trenches where the dead of a devastated city had been laid; the murmur was like the voice of storm-winds gathering, and the little lights along the housetops were for the vent-holes on the lid of a tormented underworld.