"He thought o' me, then, the little 'un did!" he muttered. "Bless his 'art for a kind little chap!"
Meanwhile his comrades outside, with a fellow-soldier's life swaying in the balance, were laughing loudly at the tricks of a native juggler, who had begged and obtained leave to enter the barrack-yard.
And why not? The same sudden and violent death might be their own lot any day. Ignorant, debauched, reckless, they, like too many of those who had cemented with their blood the foundations of Britain's Eastern empire, found their chief enjoyment in the mad whirl of battle, and their chief ambition to be able to "git drunk and forget it all!"
The juggler, who was the centre of attraction, was a very remarkable-looking man, not at all like the average of his class. His tall, sinewy frame had a tiger-like elasticity in every movement, and through the fawning servility of his manner broke ever and anon a flash of something bolder and fiercer, which would have betrayed to any keen observer that he was not what he seemed.
But no such observer was to be found among the reckless soldiers, who were firmly convinced (like most "true Britons" of that age) that no one who had not had the luck to be born an Englishman could possess either courage or any other virtue—a theory to which the great Mahratta war of 1803 was just about to give the lie in a very startling way.
The juggler began by exhibiting some of the familiar feats that have amused India in all ages, including the swallowing of a sword and the famous "mango trick," which consisted in planting a mango-seed in a tiny basket of earth and then covering it with a cloth, the withdrawal of which a moment later showed the first green shoot already springing up. At the second lifting of the cloth, this shoot was seen to have grown into a miniature tree, on which, when uncovered once more, hung a tiny fruit, which the conjurer plucked and gave to one of the spectators to eat, as a proof that it was genuine.
Then the juggler turned to the nearest of the lookers-on, and said—
"Hey, Inglis sojeer! s'pose me give you one rupee, what you do?"
"Why, I'd take it, o' course," cried the soldier, with a loud laugh at the absurdity of such a question, hoarsely echoed by all the rest.