Rung Ho! | Page 5

little service to you. Then, perhaps, you may care to recall my promise to load all the jewels you can choose out of the treasure-house on you. Then, perhaps, you may, remember that I said 'a throne is better than a grave, sahiba.' Or else - "
"Or else what, Jaimihr-sahib?" She reined again and wheeled about and faced him - pale-trembling a little - looking very small and frail beside him on his great war-horse, but not flinching under his gaze for a single second.
"Or else, sahiba- I think you saw me slay the Maharati? Do you think that I would stop at anything to accomplish what I had set out to do? See, sahiba - there is a little blood there on your jacket! Let that be for a pledge between us - for a sign - or a token of my oath that on the day I am Maharajah Howrah, you are Maharanee - mistress of all the jewels in the treasure-house!"
She shuddered. She did not look to find the blood; she took his word for that, if for nothing else.
"I wonder you dare tell me that you plot against your brother!" That was more a spoken thought than a statement or a question.
"I would be very glad if you would warn my brother!" he answered her; and she knew like a flash, and on the instant, that what he said was true. She had been warned before she came to bear no tales to any one. No Oriental would believe the tale, coming from her; the Maharajah would arrest her promptly, glad of the excuse to vent his hatred of Christian missionaries. Jaimihr would attempt a rescue; it was common knowledge that he plotted for the throne. There would be instant civil war, in which the British Government would perforce back up the alleged protector of a defenseless woman. There would be a new Maharajah; then, in a little while, and in all likelihood, she would have disappeared forever while the war raged. There would be, no doubt, a circumstantial story of her death from natural causes.
She did not answer. She stared back at him, and he smiled down at her, twisting at his mustache.
"Think!" he said, nodding. "A throne, sahiba, is considerably better than a grave!" Then he wheeled like a sudden dust-devil and decamped in a cloud of dust, followed at full pelt by his clattering escort. She watched their horses leap one after the other the corpse of the Maharati that lay by the corner where it fell, and she saw the last of them go clattering, whirling up the street through the bazaar. The old hag rose out of a shadow and trotted after her again as she turned and rode on, pale-faced and crying now a little, to the little begged school place where her father tried to din the alphabet into a dozen low-caste fosterlings.
"Father!" she cried, and she all but fell out of the saddle into his arms as the tall, lean Scotsman came to the door to meet her and stood blinking in the sunlight." Father, I've seen another man killed! I've had another scene with Jaimihr! I can't endure it! I - I - Oh, why did I ever come?"
"I don't know, dear," he answered. "But you would come, wouldn't you?"

CHAPTER II
'Twixt loot and law - 'tween creed and caste - Through slough this people wallows, To where we choose our road at last. I choose the RIGHT! Who follows?
HEMMED in amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary, secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga - all six, according to their turbans, followers of Islam - discussed matters that appeared to bring them little satisfaction.
They sat together in a dark, low-ceilinged room; its open door - it was far too hot to close anything that admitted air - gave straight onto the street, and the one big window opened on a courtyard, where a pair of game-cocks fought in and out between the restless legs of horses, while a yelling horde betted on them. On a heap of grass fodder in a corner of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony thumped a skin tom-tom with his knuckles, while at his feet the own-blood brother to the screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a wind instrument.
Din - glamour - stink - incessant movement - interblended poverty and riches rubbing shoulders - noisy self-interest side by side with introspective revery, where stray priests nodded in among the traders, - many-peopled India surged in miniature between the four hot walls and through the passage to the overflowing street; changeable and unexplainable, in ever-moving flux, but more conservative in spite of it than the very rocks she rests on - India