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-bahadur who had raised and led a regiment and licked peace into a warring countryside; and though he was that much bigger than his father had been, they dubbed him "Chota" Cunnigan on the instant.