King of the Khyber Rifles | Page 5

you've been pestering him for an appointment!"
King, with his mouth full of curr did not answer, but his eyes smiled.
"It's astonishing to me," said the major, "that a captain should leave his
company when war has begun! When I was captain I'd have been
driven out of the service if I'd asked for leave of absence at such a
time!"
King made no comment, but his expression denoted belief.
"Are you bound for the front, sir?" he asked presently. But Hyde did
not answer. They finished the meal in silence.
After lunch he was closeted with the general again for twenty minutes.
Then one of the general's carriages took him to the station; and it did
not appear to trouble him at all that the other occupant of the carriage
was the self-same Major Hyde who had sat next him at lunch. In fact,
he smiled so pleasantly that Hyde grew exasperated. Neither of them
spoke. At the station Hyde lost his temper openly, and King left him
abusing an unhappy native servant.
The station was crammed to suffocation by a crowd that roared and
writhed and smelt to high heaven. At one end of the platform, in the
midst of a human eddy, a frenzied horse resisted with his teeth and all
four feet at once the efforts of six natives and a British sergeant to force
him into a loose-box. At the back of the same platform the little
dark-brown mules of a mountain battery twitched their flanks in line,
jingling chains and stamping when the flies bit home.
Flies buzzed everywhere. Fat native merchants vied with lean and timid

ones in noisy effort to secure accommodation on a train already
crowded to the limit. Twenty British officers hunted up and down for
the places supposed to have been reserved for them, and sweating
servants hurried after them with arms full of heterogeneous baggage,
swearing at the crowd that swore back ungrudgingly. But the general
himself had telephoned for King's reservation, so he took his time.
There were din and stink and dust beneath a savage sun, shaken into
reverberations by the scream of an engine's safety valve. It was India in
essence and awake!--India arising out of lethargy!--India as she is more
often nowadays--and it made King, for the time being of the Khyber
Rifles, happier than some other men can be in ballrooms.
Any one who watched him--and there was at least one man who did--
must have noticed his strange ability, almost like that of water, to reach
the point he aimed for, through, and not around, the crowd.
He neither shoved nor argued. Orders and blows would have been
equally useless, for had it tried the crowd could not have obeyed, and it
was in no mind to try. Without the least apparent effort he arrived--and
there is no other word that quite describes it--he arrived, through the
densest part of the sweating throng of humans, at the door of the
luggage office.
There, though a bunnia's sharp elbow nagged his ribs, and the bunnia's
servant dropped a heavy package on his foot, he smiled so genially that
he melted the wrath of the frantic luggage clerk. But not at once. Even
the sun needs seconds to melt ice.
"Am I God?" the babu wailed. "Can I do all the-e things in all the-e
world at once if not sooner?"
King's smile began to get its work in. The man ceased gesticulating to
wipe sweat from his stubbly jowl with the end of a Punjabi headdress.
He actually smiled back. Who was he, that he should suspect new
outrage or guess he was about to be used in a game he did not
understand? He would have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the
merest suggestion of such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and

lapsed into his own tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle
King. A Northerner who did not seem to understand Punjabi almost
cost King his balance as he thrust broad shoulders between him and the
bunnia.
The bunnia chattered like an outraged ape; but King, the person most
entitled to be angry, actually apologized! That being a miracle, the babu
forthwith wrought another one, and within a minute King's one trunk
was checked through to Delhi.
"Delhi is right, sahib?" he asked, to make doubly sure; for in India
where the milk of human kindness is not hawked in the market- place,
men will pay over-measure for a smile.
"Yes. Delhi is right. Thank you, babuji."
He made more room for the Hillman, beaming amusement at the man's
impatience; but the Hillman had no luggage and turned away, making
an unexpected effort to hide his face with a turban end. He