He had come in his uniform of risaldar of the elder Cunningham's now disbanded regiment, so he had not removed his boots as another native--and he himself if in mufti--would have done.

Young Cunningham heard him go swaggering and clanking and spur-jingling down the corridor as though he had half a troop of horse behind him and wanted Asia to know it! It was something of a brave beginning that, for a twenty-one-year-old! Something likely--and expressly calculated by Mahommed Gunga--to bring the real man to the surface.

He had been no Cunningham unless his sense of duty had been very near the surface--no Englishman, had he not been proud that men of a foreign, conquered race should think him worthy of all that honor; and no man at all if his eye had been quite dry when the veteran light-horseman swaggered out at last and left him to his own reflections.
He had not been human if he had not felt a little homesick still, although home to him had been a place where a man stayed with distant relatives between the intervals of school.

He felt lonely, in spite of his reception--a little like a baby on the edge of all things new and wonderful.

He would have been no European if he had not felt the heat, the hotel was like a vapor-bath.
But the leaping red blood of youth ran strong in him.