Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/56

have heard of love at first sight between the sexes. A thousand and one tales have been woven about it. Can that happen only between man and woman? Perhaps so; I do not know. But between the Englishman and the little half-starved, beaten, low-caste lad there sprang up then a bond that was to lead to—but that is another story.

Two days later found the pair at Simla, the summer capital of India, among the hills, where each house looks down upon the roof-pots of its neighbors on the terrace below; and that same week found the two attached to the hunting-party of one of Billy's English friends who was bound for the High Hills. Ostensibly Billy was going to hunt, a carefree adventurer with no thought in the world other than sport. And Chota Lal, resourceful little devil that he was, was one of the hangers-on who followed them, subsisting on the careless bounty of the sahibs.

But a very different Chota Lal this, from that one who had pattered through the Motee Bazar living on his wits and the charity of those minded to acquire merit. That one had been a beggar brat in soiled and ragged clothing; this one was an Afghan lad from the top of his clean blue turban to the tips of his long upcurled slippers; impudent, and likable withal, but a total stranger to Billy—a stranger lad who mingled with the shikaris and the syees—the hunters and the grooms—or the personal servants in the swarm that always attends the Anglesi on such a trip, but he mingled not with the lordly sahibs; though of a night, had he been had he been watched, he might have been seen to wriggle as softly as a snake into Sahib Singleton's tent to retail to him the varied gossip of the day that he had picked up.

It was his strong young voice that, roused the camp to ineffectual uproar one night when he found a greased and slippery devotee of Thuggee bound for the same place. The Thug had vanished into the thin black night, easily evading the clutching hands and clumsy efforts of the sleepy servants, scarce roused from their first heavy slumber; he had gone from there, but he had left behind him that dread cord of his office: it lay in Billy Sahib's hand as Chota Lal whispered of the events of the day.

But by now their wandering road led no longer climbing, dipping, sweeping about the spurs and the stony hillsides where sounded the voices of a thousand and one water-courses, with the solemn deodars climbing one after the other with down-drooping branches. The vista of the far-rolled-out plains beneath them was done; the Sewaliks and the half-tropical Doon were behind them along with Mussoorie.

The deodars had given place to oak and birch, holly and pine, gay with rhododendrons and ferns; the bare hillsides were slippery with sunburnt grass, to merge again with the cool woodlands, while above them flamed Kedernath and Badjunath in the sunrise and sunset, true kings of the wilderness. And the gentle breezes that had blown cool in those early marches now bit deeply at heat-accustomed flesh and tugged with fierce clutching fingers at wholly inadequate garments.

Billy Singleton grinned cheerfully at these things and at the steep, breath-taking short cuts that the hillmen insisted on making, but it was no laughing matter to poor Chota Lal, who had never been so high in the diamond-clear air in all these, his twelve years. And too, Chota Lal had all the plainsman's love for a beaten trail though it wound its six-foot width as tortuously as any snake over all the country.

Along the track lay the occasional villages of the hill folk—rude huts of mud and earth and now and then a rare, crudely ax-carved timber, like