If the other men 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 line, 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 long 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 that has been born in India, and it never becomes home-like unless he spends all his youth there. The bank-book showed that if they economised 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 powers, they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done. In India all the money that people in other lands save against a rainy day runs off in loss by exchange, which to-day cuts a man's income down almost exactly to one-half There is nothing to show for money when all is put by, and that is what makes married life there so hard. Strickland used to say, sometimes, that he envied the convicts in the jail. They had no position to keep up, and the ball and chain that the worst of them wore was only a few pounds weight of iron.
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 the most of the Tonga drivers from Kalka to Tara Deva; but this new plan 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," said he, disconsolately, "and they say that I must lie still in a doolie 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 mug-gra [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."
"When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?" he replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din, and Strickland's eyebrows went up.