Young John Chinn was decanted at the verandah of the Wuddars’ lonely mess-house from the back seat of a two-wheeled cart, his gun-cases cascading all round him. The slender little, hookey-nosed boy looked forlorn as a strayed goat when he slapped the white dust off his knees, and the cart jolted down the glaring road. But in his heart he was contented. After all, this was the place where he had been born, and things were not much changed since he had been sent to England, a child, fifteen years ago. There were a few new buildings, but the air and the smell and the sunshine were the same; and the little green men who crossed the parade-ground looked very familiar. Three weeks ago John Chinn would have said he did not remember a word of the Bhil tongue, but at the mess door he found his lips moving in sentences that he did not understand—bits of old nursery rhymes, and tail-ends of such orders as his father used to give the men. The Colonel watched him come up the steps, and laughed. “Look!” he said to the Major. “No need to ask the young un’s breed. He’s a _pukka_ Chinn. Might be his father in the Fifties over again.” “Hope he’ll shoot as straight,” said the Major. “He’s brought enough ironmongery with him.” “Wouldn’t be a Chinn if he didn’t. Watch him blowin’ his nose. Regular Chinn beak. Flourishes his handkerchief like his father. It’s the second edition—line for line.” “Fairy tale, by Jove!” said the Major, peering through the slats of the jalousies. “If he’s the lawful heir, he’ll.... Now old Chinn could no more pass that chick without fiddling with it than....” “His son!” said the Colonel, jumping up. “Well, I be blowed!” said the Major. The boy’s eye had been caught by a split-reed screen that hung on a slew between the veranda pillars, and, mechanically, he had tweaked the edge to set it level. Old Chinn had sworn three times a day at that screen for many years; he could never get it to his satisfaction. His son entered the anteroom in the middle of a fivefold silence. They made him welcome for his father’s sake and, as they took stock of him, for his own. He was ridiculously like the portrait of the Colonel on the wall, and when he had washed a little of the dust from his throat he went to his quarters with the old man’s short, noiseless jungle-step. “So much for heredity,” said the Major. “That comes of four generations among the Bhils.” “And the men know it,” said a Wing officer. “They’ve been waiting for this youth with their tongues hanging out. I am persuaded that, unless he absolutely beats ’em over the head, they’ll lie down by companies and worship him.”