ent tug on
the reins, and wheeled it round to return. But the animal had a temper;
this treatment did not please it at all; and when it had got half-way
back to the starting-point, and the crowd was already yelling that the
prize was to Wahid, because he had shown the better management, suddenly
the horse stopped dead, planting his fore feet firmly in the sand; up
flew its hind hoofs, and the Rajput went clean over its head, falling
with a thwack just in front of its nose.

The roar that went up from the crowd might almost have been heard at
Peshawar. The Guides to a man shouted Ahmed's name; the Pathans among
the spectators danced a kind of war-dance, and some, losing their heads,
fired off their jazails with imminent risk of blowing some one to
pieces. Sherdil, after a glance at his commander's face, in which he
read the verdict, called to a comrade, and Ahmed was hoisted on to their
shoulders and carried in triumph back to the fort.

"Wah! Did I not say it?" cried Sherdil. "What a man seeketh happens to
him. I said 'I, Sherdil, will teach thee, Ahmed, the right way and make
thee a Guide.' And now we will have a tamasha. Lumsden Sahib will give
us a sheep or a goat, and we will be very merry."

Thus Ahmed became a trooper of the Guides.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

A Fakir

Ahmed had enlisted in the Guides with two very definite purposes--the
one closely connected with the other. The first was, to achieve
something that would establish a claim on the sahibs; the second, to
effect the release of Rahmut Khan, or at least to shorten his
imprisonment. Since the possibility of the second depended on the first,
he bent his whole energies, from the moment he donned the khaki, to the
mastery of his duties. The circumstances of his admission to the corps
were such that many eyes were watching him. Some of the men were
curious; others, Sherdil's friends, were jealous that he should justify
them; the British officers were interested, not merely in observing the
result of the experiment of enlisting one much below the average age,
but in the boy himself. There was in him a nameless something that
attracted them, and all of them, from Lumsden downwards, kept a special
eye upon his progress.

He showed himself quick at drill, and at exercise with the sword and
lance. Assad had reported quite accurately about the goose-step; but
Ahmed, so far from feeling any indignity in standing on one foot, found
it amusing to watch the l