TER VI

I take no man at rumor's price,
Nor as the gossips cry him.
A son may ride, and stride, and stand;
His father's eye--his father's hand--
His father's tongue may give command;
But ere I trust I'll try him!

BUT before young Cunningham was called upon to pay even a portion of the
price of fealty there was more of the receiving of it still in store
for him, and he found himself very hard put to it, indeed, to keep
overboiling spirits from becoming exultation of the type that nauseates.

None of the other subalterns had influence, nor had they hereditary
anchors in the far northwest that would be likely to draw them on to
active service early in their career. They had already been made to
surrender their boyhood dreams of quick promotion; now, standing in
little groups and asking hesitating questions, they discovered that
their destination--Fort William--was about the least desirable of all
the awful holes in India.

They were told that a subaltern was lucky who could mount one step of
the promotion ladder in his first ten years; that a major at fifty, a
colonel at sixty, and a general at seventy were quite the usual thing.
And they realized that the pay they would receive would be a mere
beggar's pittance in a neighborhood so expensive as Calcutta, and that
their little private means would be eaten up by the mere, necessities
of life. They showed their chagrin and it was not very easy for young
Cunningham, watching Mahommed Gunga's lordly preparations for the long
up-country journey, to strike just the right attitude of pleasure at the
prospect without seeming to flaunt his better fortune.

Mahommed Gunga interlarded his hoarse orders to the mule-drivers with
descriptions in stateliest English, thrown out at random to the world at
large, of the glories of the manlier north--of the plains, where a man
might gallop while a horse could last, and of the mountains up beyond
the plains. He sniffed at the fetid Bombay reek, and spoke of the clean
air sweeping from the snow-topped Himalayas, that put life and courage
into the lungs of men who rode like centaurs! And the other subalterns
looked wistful, eying the bullock-carts that would take their baggage by
another route.

Fully the half of what Mahommed Gunga said was due to pride of race
and country. But the rest was all deliberately calculated to rouse the
wicked envy of those who listened. He meant to make the