prince.

A little less than three months later he arrived at Bombay, and by dint
of much hard bargaining and economy fitted out himself and his escort,
so that each man looked as though he were the owner of an escort of his
own. Then, fretful at every added day that strained his fast-diminishing
resources, he settled down to wait until the ship should come that
brought young Cunningham.

CHAPTER V

Lies home beneath a sickly sun,
Where humbleness was taught me?
Or here, where spurs my father won
On bended knee are brought me?

HE landed, together with about a dozen other newly gazetted subalterns
and civil officers, cramped, storm-tossed, snubbed, and then disgorged
from a sailing-ship into a port that made no secret of its absolute
contempt for new arrivals.

There were liners of a kind on the Red Sea route, and the only seniors
who chose the long passage round the Cape were men returning after
sick-leave--none too sweet-tempered individuals, and none too prone
to give the young idea a good conceit of himself. He and the other
youngsters landed with a crushed-in notion that India would treat
them very cavalierly before she took them to herself. And all, save
Cunningham, were right.

The other men, all homesick and lonely and bewildered, were met by
bankers' agents, or, in cases, only by a hotel servant armed with a
letter of instructions. Here and there a bored, tired-eyed European had
found time, for somebody-or-other's sake, to pounce on a new arrival
and bear him away to breakfast and a tawdry imitation of the real
hospitality of northern India; but for the most part the beardless boys
lounged in the red-hot customs shed (where they were to be mulcted for
the privilege of serving their country) and envied young Cunningham.

He--as pale as they, as unexpectant as they were of anything approaching
welcome--was first amazed, then suspicious, then pleased, then proud, in
turn. The different emotions followed one another across his clean-lined
face as plainly as a dawn vista changes; then, as the dawn leaves a
landscape finally, true and what it is for all to see, true dignity was
left and the look of a man who stands in armor.

"His father's son!" growled Mahommed Gunga; and the big, black-bearded
warriors who stood behind him echoed, "Ay!"

But for four or five inches of straight stature, and a foot, perhaps,
of chest-girth, he was a second edition of the Cunnigan-baha