I believe that the side I
fight for will be the losing side."
"And yet, you stay loyal?"
"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?"
"And the Rajput boy whom you carried was my son!"
III.
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