“Have you heard the latest, Miss North?” asked Fitz Anstruther, as he escorted Mabel to the scene of action. The five men who were staying in the house had nearly come to blows in deciding who ought to enjoy this privilege, but Fitz had stepped in and disappointed them all equally by the calm announcement that it was his by right. Officially he was Major North’s deputy, and it was only fair that the pleasures as well as the duties of the post should devolve upon him. The justice of the contention was grudgingly admitted, and Fitz was the proudest man in Alibad when he drove to the ground that morning in his smart new buggy, with Mabel, the glories of her gown hidden by a tussore dust-cloak, seated beside him.
“No. What has the Commissioner done now?” she asked.
“Bahram Khan has entered his name for the Keeling Cup!”
“And that is equivalent to saying that the sky has fallen?”
Fitz regarded her pityingly. “You don’t see it as we do,” he said. “Wait until you have been out a little longer. It seems that in order to cement the reconciliation he has brought about, the Commissioner saw fit to invite the Nalapur Princes to honour us with their presence to-day. The Amir and Bahadar Shah didn’t quite see themselves figuring in the triumphal procession, and both discovered that they had urgent business at home. But Bahram Khan duly turned up last night with his train of attendants, and is condescending enough to join us in our sports to-day. The Commissioner has a theory that in such mimic warfare as this the fusion of the English and native races proceeds apace, and Bahram Khan is doing his best to gratify him by poking himself into the race for the Keeling Cup—our very tiptop, crack, pucca event!”
“But did General Keeling patronise races? I shouldn’t have thought they were at all in his line.”
“They were not; but then, this isn’t a race in the ordinary sense of the word. It was first run just at the time when everything in Khemistan was named after him, and besides, it recalls one of his own pet dodges. They say that he used to subject the men that wanted to serve under him to pretty severe tests, and this was one of them. He used to rouse them up in the middle of the night, and they had to turn out without boots, catch a strange horse, and ride him round the town without a saddle, and with only a halter for a bridle.”
“It’s to be hoped that the town was smaller in those days than now?”
“Of course it was, but we don’t exact such a test as that. The ponies are all turned loose on the course without saddles, and the men, in slippers, have to catch them and mount. Any man who catches his own is disqualified. Then they have to get them round the course without bridle or whip of any kind. I have noticed that the spectators are always pretty nearly dead with laughing before the end, while the competitors get black in the face with restrained emotion.”
“But you don’t mean that General Keeling really treated his officers in that way?”