Rung Ho!

Rung Ho!

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rung Ho!, by Talbot Mundy (#2 in
our series by Talbot Mundy)
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Title: Rung Ho!
Author: Talbot Mundy
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5153] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 16,
2002]
Edition: 10

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This eBook was transcribed by M.R.J.

RUNG HO! A Novel by Talbot Mundy

RUNG HO!

CHAPTER I
Howrah City bows the knee More or less to masters three, King, and
Prince, and Siva. Howrah City pays in pain Taxes which the royal
twain Give to priests, to give again (More or less) to Siva.
THAT was no time or place for any girl of twenty to be wandering
unprotected. Rosemary McClean knew it; the old woman, of the
sweeper caste, that is no caste at all, - the hag with the flat breasts and
wrinkled skin, who followed her dogwise, and was no more protection
than a toothless dog, - knew it well, and growled about it in incessant
undertones that met with neither comment nor response.
"Leave a pearl of price to glisten on the street, yes!" she grumbled.
"Perhaps none might notice it - perhaps! But her - here - at this time- "
She would continue in a rumbling growl of half-prophetic catalogues of
evil - some that she had seen to happen, some that she imagined, and
not any part of which was in the least improbable.
As the girl passed through the stenching, many-hued bazaar, the roar
would cease for a second and then rise again. Turbaned and pugreed -
Mohammedan and Hindoo - men of all grades of color, language, and
belief, but with only one theory on women, would stare first at the pony
that she rode, then at her, and then at the ancient grandmother who
trotted in her wake. Low jests would greet the grandmother, and then

the trading and the gambling would resume, together with the
under-thread of restlessness that was so evidently there and yet so hard
to lay a finger on.
The sun beat down pitilessly - brass - like the din of cymbals. Beneath
the sun helmet that sat so squarely and straightforwardly on the tidy
chestnut curls, her face was pale. She smiled as she guided her pony in
and out amid the roaring throng, and carefully refused to see the scowls,
her brave little shoulders seconded a pair of quiet, brave gray eyes in
showing an unconquerable courage to the world, and her clean, neat
cotton riding-habit gave the lie and the laugh in one to poverty; but, as
the crowd had its atmosphere of secret murmuring, she had another of
secret anxiety.
Neither had fear. She did not believe in it. She was there to help her
father fight inhuman wrong, and die, if need be, in the last ditch. The
crowd had none, for it had begun to realize that it was part a of a
two-hundred-million crowd, held down and compelled by less than a
hundred thousand aliens. And, least of all, had the man who followed
her at a little distance the slightest sense of fear. He was far more
conversant with it than she, but - unlike her, and far more than the
seething crowd - he knew the trend of events, and just what likelihood
there was of insult or injury to Rosemary McClean being avenged in a
generation.
He caused more comment than she, and of a different kind. His
rose-pink pugree, with the egret and the diamond brooch to hold the
egret in its place - his jeweled sabre - his swaggering, almost ruffianly
air - were no more meant to escape attention than his charger that
clattered and kicked among the crowd, or his following, who cleared a
way for him with the