Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child’s temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.
If the Policemen had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.
“He knows what honour means,” said Imam Din. “He has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father’s household as a child of the Blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger’s cub.” The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the lines, Imam Din, and, by consequence, all the others, stood upon their feet with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, “Salaam, Babajee,” and other disrespectful things.
But Strickland took counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank account, and they decided that Adam must go “home” to his aunts. But England is not home to a child who has been born in India, and it never becomes homelike unless he spends all his youth there. Their bank-book showed that if they economized through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla (where Mrs. Strickland’s parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the Government) they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done.
Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations;—Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.
Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name most of the drivers on the road there, but this new place disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking step for step as his father walked.
“There will be none of my bhai-bund [brotherhood] up there,” he said disconsolately, “and they say that I must lie still in a doolie [palanquin] for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie.”
I told him that there was a small boy, called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.
“First,” said he, “I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow’s child. If he is muggra [ill-conditioned], I shall tell my Policemen to take it away.”
“But that is unjust,” said Strickland, “and there is no order that the Police should do injustice.”