“What are you waiting there for? You will take twenty sowars and ride to Nalapur with a letter for the Amir. Go and change your things,” with a withering glance at Sir Dugald’s full-dress uniform, “and the despatches will be ready when you are. Or before,” he added savagely.
It was fortunate that Sir Dugald was a man of even temper, and had some experience of his leader’s peculiarities, for Major Keeling’s manner was unpleasant in the extreme. But as he was leaving the room he was recalled—
“You must get a guide from Shah Nawaz. Ferrers has several Nalapuris in his detachment. I will ride with you part of the way myself, and post you in the state of affairs. Send Ross to me for orders.”
The tone was quite different, and Sir Dugald had no longer reason to fear that he might unwittingly have excited his Commandant’s displeasure. He hastened to his quarters, sent a hurried message to his wife, and reappeared in undress uniform before the letter was finished, or the twenty horsemen, picked and duly equipped by Colin, had ridden into the compound before Major Keeling’s quarters. Each man carried, as was the rule on these expeditions, three days’ rations for himself and fodder for his horse, with a skin of water. When Sir Dugald had been summoned into the inner office to receive the letter, Major Keeling’s black horse Miani was brought up, and presently the little troop clattered out into the desert, the two Englishmen riding ahead, out of earshot of the sowars.
“Now!” said Major Keeling, when they had settled into the pace which experience had shown was the best for a long march, “I suppose you would like to hear what the row is about. I’m glad I kept my hands off that fellow, though I don’t know how I managed it. He wanted me to help him to murder his master and make himself Amir.”
“And what inducement did he offer?” Sir Dugald’s frigid calm in asking the question was intentional, for Major Keeling’s wrath was evidently bubbling up again.
“Half the contents of the treasury, whatever that might prove to be. But is that all you think about? Do you mean to say you don’t see the insult involved in the offer—the fellow’s opinion of us who wear the British uniform? Good heavens! are you made of stone?”
Sir Dugald smiled with some difficulty, for his face had grown tense. “You are the only man who would say such things to me, Major Keeling, and the only man I would allow to do it. With you I have no choice.”
“No, no; I beg your pardon. That abominable coolness of yours—but I shall be insulting you again if I don’t look out. But if you had sat listening to that villain for an hour, while he depicted Nalapur as a perfect hell on earth, and Wilayat Ali as a wholly suitable ruler for it, and then at last brought things round to the point he had been aiming at all along, but which I had never seen, you’d know something of what I feel. Why, the fellow had the inconceivable impudence to say that he thought I understood all the time what he was driving at, and only held back so as to make certain that he put himself completely in my power!”
“But he could never have thought we should set a Hindu over a Mohammedan state.”