during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was serialised in Adventure under the altered title of Rung Ho! before being published by Charles Scribner in the U.S., and Cassells in the U.K. Critically well received, the book sold well. In August 1914, Adventure published "The Sword of Iskander", the first of Mundy's eight novelettes revolving around the character of Dick Anthony of Arran, a Scotsman battling the Russians in Iran, which ran until March 1915. It was in his January 1914 short story "A Soldier and a Gentleman" that he introduced the character of Yasmini, a young Hindu woman who would reappear in many of his later stories. He then began work on a second novel, The Winds of the World, which told the story of a Sikh officer, Risaldar-Major Ranjoor Singh, who sets out to expose a German spy who is attempting to foment an uprising in British India; during the course of the story he introduced Yasmini as a character. Serialised in Adventure from July to September 1915, it was then published in Britain by Cassell; when Scribner declined to publish it, Mundy acquired a literary agent, Paul Reynolds. Upon publication, it received good reviews. King of the Khyber Rifles: 1916–18 Mundy authored comparatively few short stories in 1916 as he focused on his third novel, King of the Khyber Rifles, which told the story of Captain Athelstan King of the British India Secret Service and his attempt to prevent a German-backed jihad break out against the British administration in the North-West Frontier. Again, it featured Yasmini as a core character. The novel was serialised in Everybody's from May 1916 to January 1917, accompanied by illustrations by Joseph Clement Coll, a man whom Mundy praised, declaring that "there never was a better illustrator in the history of the world!". The novel was then published by U.S.-based Bobbs-Merrill in November 1916 and by U.K.-based Constable in January 1917; it received critical acclaim, with critics comparing it to the work of Kipling and H. Rider Haggard. In 1917 only two of Mundy's short stories appeared in Adventure; the first was a reprint of "The Soul of a Regiment", while the second was a sequel, "The Damned Old Nigger"; in a 1918 readership survey, these were rated as the first and third most popular stories in Adventure, respectively. From October to December 1917 he serialised his fourth novel, Hira Singh's Tale,