The roar that went up from the crowd might almost have been heard at Peshawar. The Guides to a man shouted Ahmed's name; the Pathans among the spectators danced a kind of war-dance, and some, losing their heads, fired off their jazails with imminent risk of blowing some one to pieces. Sherdil, after a glance at his commander's face, in which he read the verdict, called to a comrade, and Ahmed was hoisted on to their shoulders and carried in triumph back to the fort. "Wah! Did I not say it?" cried Sherdil. "What a man seeketh happens to him. I said 'I, Sherdil, will teach thee, Ahmed, the right way and make thee a Guide.' And now we will have a tamasha. Lumsden Sahib will give us a sheep or a goat, and we will be very merry." Thus Ahmed became a trooper of the Guides. CHAPTER THE NINTH A Fakir Ahmed had enlisted in the Guides with two very definite purposes--the one closely connected with the other. The first was, to achieve something that would establish a claim on the sahibs; the second, to effect the release of Rahmut Khan, or at least to shorten his imprisonment. Since the possibility of the second depended on the first, he bent his whole energies, from the moment he donned the khaki, to the mastery of his duties. The circumstances of his admission to the corps were such that many eyes were watching him. Some of the men were curious; others, Sherdil's friends, were jealous that he should justify them; the British officers were interested, not merely in observing the result of the experiment of enlisting one much below the average age, but in the boy himself. There was in him a nameless something that attracted them, and all of them, from Lumsden downwards, kept a special eye upon his progress. He showed himself quick at drill, and at exercise with the sword and lance. Assad had reported quite accurately about the goose-step; but Ahmed, so far from feeling any indignity in standing on one foot, found it amusing to watch the lines of men lifting and setting down their feet like automata at the word of the officers, and gravely balancing themselves like herons at a pond. He had nothing to learn in "stables" save some small matters of routine, and in three months passed as a thoroughly efficient sowar. Furthermore, he was on good terms with his comrades. Sherdil treated him as a show pupil, and one day took an opportunity of asking Lumsden Sahib whether his praise of Ahmed had not been well deserved. "Do you want us to make him a risaldar at once?" said Lumsden, with a laugh. "The heaven-born knows that I, Sherdil, am not yet a naik," said the man readily. Lumsden owed a great part of his influence with the men to the freedom he permitted in his intercourse with them. His attitude towards them was that of one brave man to another; it made for mutual respect; yet no man forgot that the commander was a hazur or presumed on his _bonhomie_.