Thus Ahmed became a trooper of the Guides.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
A Fakir
Ahmed had enlisted in the Guides with two very definite purposes—the one closely connected with the other. The first was, to achieve something that would establish a claim on the sahibs; the second, to effect the release of Rahmut Khan, or at least to shorten his imprisonment. Since the possibility of the second depended on the first, he bent his whole energies, from the moment he donned the khaki, to the mastery of his duties. The circumstances of his admission to the corps were such that many eyes were watching him. Some of the men were curious; others, Sherdil's friends, were jealous that he should justify them; the British officers were interested, not merely in observing the result of the experiment of enlisting one much below the average age, but in the boy himself. There was in him a nameless something that attracted them, and all of them, from Lumsden downwards, kept a special eye upon his progress.
He showed himself quick at drill, and at exercise with the sword and lance. Assad had reported quite accurately about the goose-step; but Ahmed, so far from feeling any indignity in standing on one foot, found it amusing to watch the lines of men lifting and setting down their feet like automata at the word of the officers, and gravely balancing themselves like herons at a pond. He had nothing to learn in "stables" save some small matters of routine, and in three months passed as a thoroughly efficient sowar. Furthermore, he was on good terms with his comrades. Sherdil treated him as a show pupil, and one day took an opportunity of asking Lumsden Sahib whether his praise of Ahmed had not been well deserved.
"Do you want us to make him a risaldar at once?" said Lumsden, with a laugh.
"The heaven-born knows that I, Sherdil, am not yet a naik," said the man readily. Lumsden owed a great part of his influence with the men to the freedom he permitted in his intercourse with them. His attitude towards them was that of one brave man to another; it made for mutual respect; yet no man forgot that the commander was a hazur or presumed on his bonhomie.
Ahmed was one of the escort that accompanied Lumsden and Sir John Lawrence to their interview with Dost Muhammed, the Amir of Kabul, at the entrance to the Khaibar Pass on the first day of the New Year. He wondered whether Jan Larrens would recognize him, but the great man was too preoccupied to notice a trooper. When it became known that in pursuance of the agreement made at that meeting Lumsden was to go before long on a mission to Kandahar, Ahmed hoped that he would be chosen among the escort on that occasion. Proximity day after day to the British officers would provide him with many opportunities of picking up their language. But before the time came for the mission to start he had reason to change his mind.
One evening, as he was passing alone through the Pathan lines of the infantry, he heard through the kusskuss matting which formed the doorway of one of the huts, and which had been blown aside for a second by a gust of wind, a voice that sounded strangely familiar. It was not the voice of any of his comrades, and for a moment he could not remember to whom it belonged. Not greatly concerned, he was passing on when he recalled it in a flash; it was certainly very much like the voice of Minghal, ex-chief of Mandan, and his father's enemy. He paused; if the speaker was indeed Minghal, what had brought him to Hoti-Mardan? Ahmed wondered whether the defeated chief had heard of his enlistment in the Guides, and had come on his own or Dilasah's behalf to do him a mischief. It occurred to him that he might be mistaken; but it was as well to make sure.