



Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England




Draw Swords! by George Manville Fenn.

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DRAW SWORDS! BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN.



CHAPTER ONE.

A FEATHER IN HIS CAP.

"Oh, I say, what a jolly shame!"

"Get out; it's all gammon.  Likely."

"I believe it's true.  Dick Darrell's a regular pet of Sir George
Hemsworth."

"Yes; the old story--kissing goes by favour."

"I shall cut the service.  It's rank favouritism."

"I shall write home and tell my father to get the thing shown up in the
House of Commons."

"Why, he's only been out here a year."

Richard Darrell, a well-grown boy of seventeen, pretty well tanned by
the sun of India, stood flashed with annoyance, looking sharply from one
speaker to another as he stood in the broad veranda of the officers'
quarters in the Roumwallah Cantonments in the northern portion of the
Bengal Presidency, the headquarters of the artillery belonging to the
Honourable the East India Company, commonly personified as "John Company
of Leadenhall Street."  It was over sixty years ago, in the days when,
after a careful training at the Company's college near Croydon, young
men, or, to be more correct, boys who had made their marks, received
their commission, and were sent out to join the batteries of artillery,
by whose means more than anything else the Company had by slow degrees
conquered and held the greater part of the vast country now fully added
to the empire and ruled over by the Queen.

It was a common affair then for a lad who had been a schoolboy of
sixteen, going on with his studies one day, to find himself the next, as
it were, a