“When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?” Adam replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din; and Strickland’s eyebrows went up.
“You talk too much to the Police, my son,” he said.
“Always. About everything,” said Adam promptly. “They say that when I am an officer I shall know as much as my father.”
“God forbid, little one!”
“They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan [the Evil One], to know things.”
“They say that, do they?” and Strickland looked pleased. His pay was small, but he had his reputation, and it was dear to him.
“They say also—not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind the wall—that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman [Soloman], who was cheated by Shaitan.”
This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence, launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his side Shaitan sent “a little devil of low caste,” as Adam put it, who cheated him utterly and put him to shame before “all the other Kings.”
“By Gum!” said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din’s stories. I did not wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.
That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or palanquin along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the doolie with his mother, and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a wet hot night among the rice and poppy fields.