"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.