poor
one, until he knows the way."

"Leave him to me! I will show him the way, and we will see what we will
see. If he is to disgrace his father's memory and us, he shall do it
where there are few to see and none to talk of it. When Alwa and the
others ask me, as they will ask, 'Is he a man?' I will give them a true
answer! I think he is a man, but I need to test him in all ways possible
before I pledge my word on it."

But after that little accident the old risaldar had sword-sticks
fashioned at a village near the road, and ran no more risks of being
killed by the stripling he would teach; and before many more days of
the road had ribboned out, young Cunningham--bareback or from the
saddle--could beat him to the ground, and could hold his own on foot
afterward with either hand.

"The hand and eye are good!" said Mahommed Gunga. "It is time now for
another test."

So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for four
days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a foul-mouthed
fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads. It was a strangely chosen
place to rest at.

Deep down in a hollow, where the trunk road took advantage of a winding
gorge between the hills--screened on nearly all sides by green
jungle whose brown edges wilted in the heat which the inner steam
defied--stuffy, smelly, comfortless, it stood like a last left
rear-guard of a white-man's city, swamped by the deathless, ceaselessly
advancing tide of green. It was tucked between mammoth trees that
had been left there when the space for it was cleared a hundred
years before, and that now stood like grim giant guardians with arms
out-stretched to hold the verdure back.

The little tribe of camp-followers chased at least a dozen snakes out
of corners, and slew them in the open, as a preliminary to further
investigation. There were kas-kas mats on the foursquare floors, and
each of these, when lifted, disclosed a swarm of scorpions that had to
be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in. The once
white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased
one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was
a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and
war to the death behind skirting boards and underneath the floor.

It had evidently not been occupied for many years; the kansamah looked
like a gray-bearded skeleton compressed within a tightened shroud of