He was a man who did not worry about the feelings of senile heads of red-tape-bound departments; nor was he particularly hidebound by respect for the laws of evidence.  When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he either acted or did not act, as the circumstances might dictate.  And when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in several colored inks, on all the special forms be could get hold of.  The heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying to get the form of the report straightened out to be able to give any attention to the details of it; and then it would be too late.  But he was a brigadier, and what he could do with impunity and quiet amusement would have brought down the whole Anglo-Indian Government in awful wrath on the head of a subordinate.

He heard of the tribesmen under Khumel Khan one evening.  At dawn his tents stood empty and the horse-lines were long bands of brown on the green grass.  The pegs were up; only the burying beetles labored where the stamping chargers had neighed overnight.

The hunger-making wind that sweeps down, snow-sweetened, from the Himalayas bore with it intermittent thunder from four thousand hoofs as, split in three and swooping from three different directions, the squadrons viewed, gave tongue, and launched themselves, roaring, at the half-awakened plotters of the night before.

There was a battle, of a kind, in a bowlder-lined valley where the early morning sun had not yet reached to lift the chill.  Long lances —­devils’ antennae—­searched out the crevices where rock-bred mountain-men sought cover; too suddenly for clumsy-fingered Hillmen to reload, the reformed troops charged wedgewise into rallying detachments.  In an hour, or less, there were prisoners being herded like cattle in the valley bottom, and a sting had been drawn from the border wasp that would not grow again for a year or two to come.

But Khumel Khan was missing.  Khumel Khan, the tulwar man—­he whose boast it was that he could hew through two men’s necks at one whistling sweep of his notched, curved cimeter—­had broken through with a dozen at his back.  He had burst through the half-troop guarding the upper end of the defile, had left them red and reeling to count their dead, and the overfolding hill-spurs swallowed him.

“Mr. Cunningham!  Take your troop, please, and find their chief!  Hunt him out, ride him down, and get him!  Don’t come back until you do!”

The real thing!  The real red thing within a year!  A lone command—­ and that is the only thing a subaltern of spunk may pray for!—­ eighty-and-eight hawk-eyed troopers asking only for the opportunity to show their worth—­lean, hungry hills to hunt in, no commissariat, fair law to the quarry, and a fight—­as sure as God made mountains, a fight at the other end!  There are men here and there who think that the day when they pass down a crowded aisle with Her is the great one, other great days are all as gas-jets to the sun.  And there are others.  There are men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit out into the unknown.  The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla.