Wherever there were Rajputs--and that race of fighting men is scattered all about the north--there was ill-suppressed impatience for the bursting of the wrath to come.

They bore no grudge against the English, but they did bear more than grudge against the money-lenders and the fat, litigious traders who had fattened under British rule.

At least at the beginning it was evident that all the interest of all the Rajputs lay in letting the British get the worst of it; even should the British suddenly wake up and look about them and take steps--or should the British hold their own with native aid, and so save India from anarchy, and afterward reward the men who helped--the Rajputs would stand to gain less individually, or even collectively, than if they let the English be driven to the sea, and then reverted to the age-old state of feudal lawlessness that once had made them rich.
Many of the Hindoo element among them were almost openly disloyal.

The ryots--the little one and two acre farmers--were the least unsettled; they, when he asked them--and he asked often--disclaimed the least desire to change a rule that gave them safe holdings and but one tax-collection a year; they were frankly for their individual selves--not even for one another, for the ryots as a class.
Nobody seemed to be for India, except Mahommed Gunga; and he said little, but asked ever-repeated questions as he rode.

There were men who would like to weld Rajputana into one again, and over-ride the rest of India; and there were other men who planned to do the same for the Punjaub; there were plots within plots, not many of which he learned in anything like detail, but none of which were more than skin-deep below the surface.