All along the trunk road, that trails by many thousand towns and listens to a hundred languages, whatever good there was was Cunningham's.

Whichever room was best in each dak-bungalow, whichever chicken the kansamah least desired to kill, whoever were the stoutest dhoolee-bearers in the village, whichever horse had the easiest paces--all were Cunningham's.

Respect were his, and homage and obeisance, for the Rajput saw to it.
Of evenings, while they rested, but before the sun went down, the old risaldar would come with his naked sabre and defy "Chota" Cunnigan to try to touch him.

For five long weeks he tried each evening, the Rajput never doing anything but parry,--changing his sabre often to the other hand and grinning at the schoolboy swordsmanship--until one evening, at the end of a more than usually hard-fought bout, the youngster pricked him, lunged, and missed slitting his jugular by the merest fraction of an inch.
"Ho!" laughed Mahommed Gunga later, as he sluiced out the cut while his own adherents stood near by and chaffed him.

"The cub cuts his teeth, then! Soon it will be time to try his pluck." "Be gentle with him, risaldar-sahib; a good cub dies as easily as a 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.