“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.
“Now what d'you expect to get out of your country?” the Infant asked, when—our India laid aside we talked Adam's Africa. It roused him at once.
“Rubber—nuts—gums—and so on,” he said. “But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”
“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”
“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market.”
“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.
“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton.”
“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.
“The best man alive—absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him”—Adam jerked out some heathen phrase—“that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know.”
“I'm glad of that. Because I've heard—from other quarters”—Stalky's sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father's policemen twenty years before, and his mother's eyes shining through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One must not mock a young man's first love or loyalty.