, sahib!" and went clambering up the hill.

He let me stand three minutes, reading my eyes through the darkness,
before he motioned me to sit. So then we sat facing, I on one side
of the fire and he the other.

"I have watched you, Hira Singh," he said at last. "Now and again I
have seemed to see a proper spirit in you. Nay, words are but
fragments of the wind!" said he. (I had begun to make him
protestations.) "There are words tossing back and forth below," he
said, looking past me down into the hollow, where shadows of men
were, and now and then the eye of a horse would glint in firelight.
Then he said quietly, "The spirit of a Sikh requires deeds of us."

"Deeds in the dark?" said I, for I hoped to learn more of what was
in his mind.

"Should a Sikh's heart fail him in the dark?" he asked.

"Have I failed you," said I, "since you came to us in the prison
camp?"

"Who am I?" said he, and I did not answer, for I wondered what he
meant. He said no more for a minute or two, but listened to our
pickets calling their numbers one to another in the dark above us.

"If you serve me," he said at last, "how are you better than the
stable-helper in cantonments who groomed my horse well for his own
belly's sake? I can give you a full belly, but your honor is your
own. How shall I know your heart?"

I thought for a long while, looking up at the stars. He was not
impatient, so I took time and considered well, understanding him
now, but pained that he should care nothing for my admiration.

"Sahib," I said finally, "by this oath you shall know my heart.
Should I ever doubt you, I will tear out your heart and lay it on a
dung-hill."

"Good!" said he. But I remember he made me no threat in return, so
that even to this day I wonder how my words sounded in his ears. I
am left wondering whether I was man enough to dare swear such an
oath. If he had sworn me a threat in return I should have felt more
at ease--more like his equal. But who would have gained by that? My
heart and my belly are not one. Self-satisfaction would not have
helped.

"Soon," he said, looking into my eyes beside the fire, "we shall
meet opportunities for looting. Yet we have food enough for men and
mules and horses for many a day to come; and as the corn grows less
more men can ride in the carts, so that we shall move the swifter.
But now this map of mine grows vague and our road leads more and
more into the unknown. We need eyes ahead of us. I can con