“Why not?”
“All the same, Juggut Khan—I'm not emotional, or a man of many words. I don't trust Indians as a rule! I—but—here—will you shake hands?”
“Certainly, sahib!” said the Rajput. “We be two men, you and I! Why should the one be loyal and the other not?”
“When this is over,” said Brown, “if it ends the way we want, and we're both alive, I'd like to call myself your friend!”
“I have always been your friend, sahib, and you mine, since the day when you bandaged up a boy and gave him your own drinking-water and carried him in to Bholat on your shoulder, twenty miles or more.”
“Oh, as for that—any other man would have done the same thing. That was nothing!”
“Strange that when a white man does an honorable deed he lies about it!” said Juggut Khan. “That was not nothing, sahib, and you know it was not nothing! You know that from the heat and the exertion you were ill for more than a month afterward. And you know that there were others there, of my own people, who might have done what you did, and did not!”
“But, hang it all! Why drag up a little thing like this?”
“Because, sahib, I might have no other opportunity, and—”
“Well? And what?”