“I am sure I am doing right,” he said in answer to Frank’s remonstrances. “Don’t you understand, a native in Nana Sahib’s position must be well informed as to the exact position of affairs. By helping me he is safeguarding himself. I am only too thankful he was able to subdue that fiery harpy, the Begum. She threatened me in the most outrageous manner before you came. Of course, Winifred and I will be ever-lastingly grateful to you for coming to our assistance. You are alone, I suppose?”

“Yes, though some of our troopers may turn up any minute.”

“I fear not,” said the older man gravely. “This is a bad business, Malcolm. The Begum said too much. There are worse times in store for us. Do you really believe you can reach Meerut safely?”

“I rode here without hindrance.”

“Let me advise you, then, to slip away before we start. That woman meant mischief, or she would never have dared to suggest that a British officer should throw in his lot with hers. Waste no time, and don’t spare that good horse of yours. Be sure I shall tell Winifred all you have done for us. She is pulling round, I think, and it will be better that she should not see you again. Besides, the Nana’s escort are preparing to march.”

Frank’s latest memory of the girl he loved was a sad one. Her white face looked ethereal in the moonlight, and her bloodless lips were quivering with returning life. It was hard to leave her in such a plight, but it would only unnerve her again if he waited until she was conscious to bid her farewell.

So he rode back to Meerut, a solitary European on the eight miles of road, and no man challenged him till he reached the famous bivouac of the white garrison, the bivouac that made the Mutiny an accomplished fact.

CHAPTER III

In the center of the river line stood the imposing red sandstone palace of Bahadur Shah, last of the Moguls. North of this citadel were the magazine, the Church, some European houses, and the cutcherry, or group of minor law courts, while the main thoroughfare leading in that direction passed through the Kashmir Gate. Southward from the fort stretched the European residential suburb known as Darya Gunj (or, as it would be called in England, the “Riverside District”) out of which the Delhi Gate gave access to the open country and the road to Humayun’s Tomb. Another gate, the Raj Ghât, opened toward the river between the palace and Darya Gunj. Thus, the walls of city and palace ran almost straight for two miles from the Kashmir Gate on the north to the Delhi Gate on the south, while the main road connecting the two passed the fort on the landward side.

The Lahore Gate of the palace, a magnificent structure, commanded the bazaar and its chief street, the superb Chandni Chowk, which extended due west for nearly two miles to the Lahore Gate of the city itself. Near the palace, in a very large garden, stood the spacious premises of the Delhi Bank. A little farther on, but on the opposite side of the Chowk, was the Kotwallee, or police station, and still farther, practically in the center of the dense bazaar, two stone elephants marked the entrance to the beautiful park now known as the Queen’s Gardens.

The remainder of the space within the walls was packed with the houses and shops of well-to-do traders, and the lofty tenements or mud hovels in which dwelt a population of artisans noted not only for their artistic skill but for a spirit of lawlessness, a turbulent fanaticism, that had led to many scenes of violence in the city’s earlier history.

The whole of Delhi, as well as the palace—which had its own separate fortifications—was surrounded by a wall seven miles long, twenty-four feet in height, well supplied with bastions, and containing ten huge gates, each a small fort in itself. The wall was protected by a dry fosse, or ditch, twenty-five feet wide and about twenty feet deep; this, in turn, was guarded by a counterscarp and glacis.

On the northwest side of Delhi, and about a mile distant from the river, an irregular, rock-strewn spine of land, called the Ridge, rose above the general level of the plain, and afforded a panoramic view of the city and palace. The rising ground began about half a mile from the Mori Gate—which was situated on what may be termed the landward side of the Kashmir Gate. It followed a course parallel with the river for two miles, and at its northerly extremity were situated the principal European bungalows and the military cantonment.

Delhi was the center of Mohammedan hopes; its palace held the lineal descendant of Aurangzebe, with his children and grandchildren; it was stored to repletion with munitions of war; yet, such was the inconceivable folly of the rulers of India at that time, the nearest British regiments were stationed in Meerut, while the place swarmed with native troops, horse, foot and artillery!

A May morning in the Punjab must not be confused with its prototype in Britain. Undimmed by cloud, unchecked by cooling breeze, the sun scorches the earth from the moment his glowing rays first peep over the horizon. Thus men who value their health and have work to be done rise at an hour when London’s streets are emptiest. Merchants were busy in the bazaar, soldiers were on parade, judges were sitting in the courts of the cutcherry, and the European housewives of the station were making their morning purchases of food for breakfast and dinner, when some of the loungers on the river-side wall saw groups of horsemen raising the dust on the Meerut road beyond the bridge of boats which spanned the Jumna.

The word went round that something unusual had happened. Already the idlers had noted the arrival of a dust-laden royal carriage, which crossed the pontoons at breakneck speed and entered by the Calcutta Gate. That incident, trivial in itself, became important when those hard-riding horsemen came in sight. The political air was charged with electricity. None knew whether it would end in summer lightning or in a tornado, so there was much running to and fro, and gesticulations, and excited whisperings among those watchers on the walls.

Vague murmurs of doubt and surprise reached the ears of two of the British magistrates. They hurriedly adjourned the cases they were trying and sent for their horses. One rode hard to the cantonment and told Brigadier Graves what he had seen and heard; the other, knowing the immense importance of the chief magazine, went there to warn Lieutenant Willoughby, the officer in charge.

Here, then, in Delhi, were men of prompt decision, but the troops on whom they could have depended were forty miles away in Meerut, in that never-to-be-forgotten bivouac. Meanwhile, the vanguard of the Meerut rebels had arrived. Mostly troopers of Malcolm’s regiment, with some few sepoys who had stolen ponies on the way, they crossed the Jumna, some going straight to the palace by way of the bridge of boats, while others forded the river to the south and made for the gaol, where, as usual, they released the prisoners. This trick of emptying the penitentiaries was more adroit than it seems at first sight. Not only were the mutineers sure of obtaining hearty assistance in their campaign of robbery and murder, but every gaol-bird headed direct for his native town as soon as he was gorged with plunder. There was no better means of disseminating the belief that the British power had crumbled to atoms. The convicts boasted that they had been set free by the rebels; they paraded their ill-gotten gains and incited ignorant villagers to emulate the example of the towns. Thus a skilful and damaging blow was struck at British prestige. Neither Mohammedan moullah nor Hindu fakir carried such conviction to ill-informed minds as the appearance of some known malefactor decked out in the jewels and trinkets of murdered Englishwomen.

The foremost of the mutineers reined in their weary horses beneath a balcony on which Bahadur Shah, a decrepit old man of eighty, awaited them.

By his side stood his youngest daughter, the Roshinara Begum. Her eyes were blazing with triumph, yet her lips curved with contempt at the attitude of her trembling father.

“You see!” she cried. “Have I not spoken truly? These are the men who sacked Meerut. Scarce a Feringhi lives there save those whom I have saved to good purpose. Admit your troops! Proclaim yourself their ruler. A moment’s firmness will win back your empire.”

The aged monarch, now that the hour was at hand that astrologers had predicted and his courtiers had promised for many a year, faltered his dread lest they were not all committing a great mistake.

“This is no woman’s work,” he protested. “Where are my sons? Where is the Shahzada, Mirza Mogul?”

She knew. The heir apparent and his brothers were cowering in fear, afraid to strike, yet hoping that others would strike for them. She almost dragged her father to the front of the balcony. The troopers recognized him with a fierce shout. A hundred sabers were waved frantically.

“Help us, O King!” they cried. “We pray your help in our fight for the faith!”

Captain Douglas, commandant of the palace guards, hearing the uproar ran to the King. He did not notice the girl Roshinara, who stood there like a caged tigress.

“How dare you intrude on the King’s privacy?” he cried, striving to overawe the rebels by his cool demeanor. “You must lay down your arms if you wish His Majesty’s clemency. He is here in person and that is his command.”

A yell of defiance greeted his bold words. The Begum made a signal with her hand which was promptly understood. Away clattered the troopers towards the Raj Ghât Gate. There they were admitted without parley. The city hell hounds sprang to meet them and the slaughter of inoffensive Europeans began in Darya Gunj.

It was soon in full swing. The vile deeds of the night at Meerut were re-enacted in the vivid sunlight at Delhi. Leaving their willing allies to carry sword and torch through the small community in that quarter the sowars rode to the Lahore Gate of the palace. It was thrown open by the King’s guards and dependents. Captain Douglas, and the Commissioner, Mr. Fraser, made vain appeals to men whose knees would have trembled at their frown a few minutes earlier. Thinking to escape and summon assistance from the cantonment, Douglas mounted the wall and leaped into the moat. He broke one, if not both, of his legs. Some scared coolies lifted him and carried him back to the interior of the palace. Fraser tried to protect him while he was being taken to his apartments over the Lahore Gate, but a jeweler from the bazaar stabbed the Commissioner and he was killed by the guards. Then the mob rushed up-stairs and massacred the collector, the chaplain, the chaplain’s daughter, a lady who was their guest, and the injured Douglas.

Another dreadful scene was enacted in the Delhi Bank. The manager and his brave wife, assisted by a few friends who happened to be in the building at the moment, made a stubborn resistance, but they were all cut down. The masters in the Government colleges were surprised and murdered in their class-rooms. The missionaries, whether European or native, were slaughtered in their houses and schools. The editorial staff and compositors of the Delhi Gazette, having just produced a special edition of the paper announcing the crisis, were all stabbed or bludgeoned to death. In the telegraph office a young signaler was sending a thrilling message to Umballa, Lahore and the north.

“The sepoys have come in from Meerut,” he announced with the slow tick of the earliest form of apparatus. “They are burning everything. Mr. Todd is dead, and, we hear, several Europeans. We must shut up.”

That was his requiem. The startled operators at Umballa could obtain no further intelligence and the boy was slain at his post.[3]

The magistrate who galloped to the cantonment found no laggards there. Brigadier Graves sent Colonel Ripley with part of the 54th Native Infantry to occupy the Kashmir Gate. The remainder of the 54th escorted two guns under Captain de Teissier.

Ripley reached the main guard, just within the gate, when some troopers of the 3d rode up. The Colonel ordered his men to fire at them. The sepoys refused to obey, and the sowars, drawing their pistols, shot dead or severely wounded six British officers. Then the 54th bayoneted their Colonel, but, hearing the rumble of de Teissier’s guns, fled into the city. The guard of the gate, composed of men of the 38th, went with them, but their officer, Captain Wallace, had ridden, fortunately for himself, to hurry the guns. He was sent on to the cantonment to ask for re-enforcements. Not a man of the 38th would follow him, but the 74th commanded by Major Abbott, proclaimed their loyalty and asked to be led against the mutineers.

Perforce their commander trusted them. He brought them to the Kashmir Gate with two more guns, while the Brigadier and his staff, wondering why they heard nothing of the pursuing British from Meerut, thought it advisable to gather the women and children and other helpless persons, both European and native, in the Flagstaff Tower, a small building situated on the northern extremity of the Ridge.

There for some hours a great company of frightened people endured all the discomforts of terrific heat, hunger, and thirst, while wives and mothers, striving to soothe their wailing little ones, were themselves consumed with anxiety as to the fate of husbands and sons.

At the main guard there was a deadlock. Major Abbott and his brother officers, trying to keep their men loyal, stood fast and listened to the distant turmoil in the city. Like the soldiers in Meerut, they never guessed a tithe of the horrors enacted there. They were sure that the white troops in Meerut would soon arrive and put an end to the prevalent anarchy. Yet the day sped and help came not.

Suddenly the sound of a tremendous explosion rent the air and a dense cloud of white smoke, succeeded by a pall of dust, rose between the gate and the palace. Willoughby had blown up the magazine! Why? Two artillery subalterns who had fought their way through a mob stricken with panic for the moment, soon arrived. Their story fills one of the great pages of history.

Lieutenant Willoughby, a boyish-looking subaltern of artillery, whose shy, refined manners hid a heroic soul, lost no time in making his dispositions for the defense of the magazine when he knew that a mutiny was imminent. He had with him eight Englishmen, Lieutenants Forrest and Raynor, Conductors Buckley, Shaw and Scully, Sub-Conductor Crow, and Sergeants Edwards and Stewart. The nine barricaded the outer gates and placed in the best positions guns loaded with grape. They laid a train from the powder store to a tree in the yard. Scully stood there. He promised to fire the powder when his young commander gave the signal.

Then they waited. A stormy episode was taking place inside the fort. Bahadur Shah held out against the vehement urging of his daughter aided now by the counsel of her brothers. Ever and anon he went to the river balcony which afforded a view of the Meerut road. At last he sent mounted men across the river. When these scouts returned and he was quite certain that none but rebel sepoys were streaming towards Delhi from Meerut, he yielded.

The surrender of the magazine was demanded in his name. His adherents tried to rush the gate and walls, and were shot down in scores. The attack grew more furious and sustained. The white men served their smoking cannon with a wild energy that, for a time, made the gallant nine equal to a thousand. Of course such a struggle could have only one end. Willoughby, in his turn, ran to the river bastion. Like the king, he looked towards Meerut. Like the king, he saw none but mutineers. Then, when the enemy were clambering over the walls and rushing into the little fort from all directions, he raised his sword and looked at Conductor Buckley. Buckley lifted his hat, the agreed signal, and Scully fired the train. Hundreds of rebels were blown to pieces, as they were already inside the magazine. Scully was killed where he stood. Willoughby leaped from the walls, crossed the river, and met his death while striving to reach Meerut. Lieutenants Forrest and Raynor, Conductors Buckley and Shaw, and Sergeant Stewart escaped, and were given the Victoria Cross.

Yet, so curiously constituted is the native mind, the blowing-up of the magazine was the final tocsin of revolt. It seemed to place beyond doubt that which all men were saying. The king was fighting the English. Islam was in the field against the Nazarene. The Mogul Empire was born again and the iron grip of British rule was relaxed. At once the sepoys at the Kashmir Gate fired a volley at the nearest officers, of whom three fell dead.

Two survivors rushed up the bastion and jumped into the ditch. Others, hearing the shrieks of some women in the guard room, poor creatures who had escaped from the city, ran through a hail of bullets and got them out. Fastening belts and handkerchiefs together, the men lowered the women into the fosse and, with extraordinary exertions, lifted them up the opposite side.

At the Flagstaff Tower the 74th and the remainder of the 38th suddenly told their officers that they would obey them no longer. When this last shred of hope was gone, the Brigadier reluctantly gave the order to retreat. The women and children were placed in carriages and a mournful procession began to straggle through the deserted cantonment along the Alipur Road.

Soon the fugitives saw their bungalows on fire. “Then,” says that accurate and impartial historian of the Mutiny, Mr. T. R. E. Holmes, “began that piteous flight, the first of many such incidents which hardened the hearts of the British to inflict a terrible revenge.... Driven to hide in jungles or morasses from despicable vagrants—robbed, and scourged, and mocked by villagers who had entrapped them with promises of help—scorched by the blazing sun, blistered by burning winds, half-drowned in rivers which they had to ford or swim across, naked, weary and starving, they wandered on; while some fell dead by the wayside, and others, unable to move farther, were abandoned by their sorrowing friends to die on the road.”

In such wise did the British leave Imperial Delhi. They came back, later, but many things had to happen meanwhile.

The volcanic outburst in the Delhi district might have been paralleled farther north were not the Punjab fortunate in its rulers. Sir John Lawrence was Chief Commissioner at Lahore. When that fateful telegram from Delhi was received in the capital of the Punjab he was on his way to Murree, a charming and secluded hill station, for the benefit of his health. But, like most great men, Lawrence had the faculty of surrounding himself with able lieutenants.

His deputy, Robert Montgomery, whose singularly benevolent aspect concealed an iron will, saw at once that if the Punjab followed the lead of Meerut and Delhi, India would be lost. Lahore had a mixed population of a hundred thousand Sikhs and Mohammedans, born soldiers every man, and ready to take any side that promised to settle disputes by cold steel rather than legal codes. If these hot heads, with their millions of co-religionists in the land of the Five Rivers, were allowed to gain the upper hand, they would sweep through the country from the mountains to the sea.

The troops, British and native, were stationed in the cantonment of Mian-mir, some five miles from Lahore. There were one native cavalry regiment and three native infantry battalions whose loyalty might be measured by minutes as soon as they learnt that the standard of Bahadur Shah was floating over the palace at Delhi. To quell them the authorities had the 81st Foot and two batteries of horse artillery, or, proportionately, far less a force than that at Meerut, the Britons being outnumbered eight times by the natives.

Montgomery coolly drove to Mian-mir on the morning of the 12th, took counsel with the Brigadier, Stuart Corbett, and made his plans. A ball was fixed for that night. All society attended it, and men who knew that the morrow’s sun might set on a scene of bloodshed and desolation danced gaily with the ladies of Lahore. Surely those few who were in the secret of the scheme arranged by Montgomery and Corbett must have thought of a more famous ball at Brussels on a June night in 1815.

Next morning the garrison fell in for a general parade of all arms. The artillery and 81st were on the right of the line, the native infantry in the center, and the sowars on the left. A proclamation by Government announcing the disbandment of the 34th at Barrackpore was read, and may have given some inkling of coming events to the more thoughtful among the sepoys. But they had no time for secret murmurings. Maneuvers began instantly. In a few minutes the native troops found themselves confronted by the 81st and the two batteries of artillery.

Riding between the opposing lines, the Brigadier told the would-be mutineers that he meant to save them from temptation by disarming them.

“Pile arms!” came the resolute command.

They hesitated. The intervening space was small. By sheer weight of numbers they could have borne down the British.

“Eighty-first—load!” rang out the ominous order.

As the ears of the startled men caught the ring of the ramrods in the Enfield rifles, their eyes saw the lighted port fires of the gunners. They were trapped, and they knew it. They threw down their weapons with sullen obedience and the first great step towards the re-conquest of India was taken.

Inspired by Montgomery the district officers at Umritsar, Mooltan, Phillour, and many another European center in the midst of warlike and impetuous races, followed his example and precept. Brigadier Innes at Ferozpore hesitated. He tried half measures. He separated his two native regiments and thought to disarm them on the morrow. That night one of them endeavored to storm the magazine, burnt and plundered the station, and marched off towards Delhi. But Innes then made amends. He pursued and dispersed them. Only scattered remnants of the corps reached the Mogul capital.

Thus Robert Montgomery, the even-tempered, suave, smooth-spoken Deputy Commissioner of Lahore! In the far north, at Peshawur, four other men of action gathered in conclave. The gay, imaginative, earnest-minded Herbert Edwardes, the hard-headed veteran, Sydney Cotton, the dashing soldier, Neville Chamberlain, and the lustrous-eyed, black-bearded, impetuous giant, John Nicholson—that genius who at thirty-five had already been deified by a brotherhood of Indian fakirs and placed by Mohammedans among the legendary heroes of their faith—these four sat in council and asked, “How best shall we serve England?”

They answered that question with their swords.

CHAPTER IV

In each case the tiny detachment discovered blackened walls and unburied corpses. The Meerut district abounded with Goojers, the hereditary thieves of India, and these untamed savages had lost none of their wild-beast ferocity under fifty years of British rule. They killed and robbed with an impartiality that was worthy of a better cause. When Europeans, native travelers and mails were swept out of existence they fought each other. Village boundaries which had been determined under Wellesley’s strong government at the beginning of the century were re-arranged now with match-lock, spear and tulwar. Old feuds were settled in the old way and six inches of steel were more potent than the longest Order in Council. Yet these ghouls fled at the sight of the smallest white force, and Malcolm and his irregulars rode unopposed through a blood-stained and deserted land.

On the 21st of May, eleven days after the outbreak of the Mutiny, though never a dragoon or horse gunner had left Meerut cantonment since they marched back to their quarters from the ever-memorable bivouac, Malcolm led his light horsemen north, along the Grand Trunk Road in the direction of Mazuffernugger.

A native brought news that a collector and his wife were hiding in a swamp near the road. Happily, in this instance, the two were rescued, more dead than alive. The man, ruler of a territory as big as the North Riding of Yorkshire, his wife, a young and well-born Englishwoman, were in the last stage of misery. The unhappy lady, half demented, was nursing a dead baby. When the child was taken from her she fell unconscious and had to be carried to Meerut on a rough litter.

The little cavalcade was returning slowly to the station[4] when one of the troopers caught the hoof beats of a galloping horse behind them. Malcolm reined up, and soon a British officer appeared round a bend in the road. Mounted on a hardy country-bred, and wearing the semi-native uniform of the Company’s regiments, the aspect of the stranger was sufficiently remarkable to attract attention apart from the fact that he came absolutely alone from a quarter where it was courting death to travel without an escort. He was tall and spare of build, with reddish brown hair and beard, blue eyes that gleamed with the cold fire of steel, close-set lips, firm chin, and the slightly-hooked nose with thin nostrils that seems to be one of nature’s tokens of the man born to command his fellows when the strong arm and clear brain are needed in the battle-field.

He rode easily, with a loose rein, and he waved his disengaged hand the instant he caught sight of the white faces.

“Are you from Meerut?” he asked, his voice and manner conveying a curious blend of brusqueness and gentility, as his tired horse willingly pulled up alongside Nejdi.

“Yes. And you?” said Malcolm, trying to conceal his amazement at this apparition.

“I am Lieutenant Hodson of the 1st Bengal Fusiliers. I have ridden from Kurnaul, where the Commander-in-Chief is waiting until communication is opened with Meerut. Where is General Hewitt?”

“I will take you to him! From Kurnaul, did you say? When did you start?”

“About this hour yesterday.”

Malcolm knew then that this curt-spoken cavalier had ridden nearly a hundred miles through an enemy’s country in twenty-four hours.

“Is your horse equal to another hour’s canter?” he inquired.

“He ought to be. I took him from a bunniah when my own fell dead in a village about ten miles in the rear.”

Bidding a young bank manager take charge of the detachment, Frank led the newcomer rapidly to headquarters. Hodson asked a few questions and made his companion’s blood boil by the unveiled contempt he displayed on hearing of the inaction at Meerut.

“You want Nicholson here,” said he, laughing with grim mirth. “By all the gods, he would horse-whip your general into the saddle.”

“Hewitt is an old man, and cautious, therefore,” explained Frank, in loyal defense of his chief. “Perhaps he deems it right to await the orders you are now bringing.”

“An old man! You mean an old woman, perhaps? I come from one. I had to go on my knees almost before I could persuade Anson to let me start.”

“Well, you must admit that you have made a daring and lucky ride?”

“Nonsense! Why is one a soldier! I would cross the infernal regions if the need arose. If I had been in Meerut on that Sunday evening, no general that ever lived could have kept me out of Delhi before daybreak. The way to stop this mutiny was to capture that doddering old king and hold him as a hostage, and twenty determined men could have done it easily in the confusion.”

That was William Hodson’s way. Men who met him began by disliking his hectoring, supercilious bearing. They soon learnt to forget his gruffness and think only of his gallantry and good-comradeship.

At any rate his stirring advice and the dispatches he brought roused the military authorities at Meerut into activity. Carrying with him a letter to the Commander-in-Chief he quitted Meerut again that night, and dismounted outside Anson’s tent at Kurnaul at dawn on the second day!

On the 27th, Archdale Wilson led the garrison towards the rendezvous fixed on by the force hurriedly collected in the Punjab for the relief of Delhi. On the afternoon of the 30th, cavalry vedettes reported the presence of a strong body of mutineers on the right bank of the river Hindun, near the village of Ghazi-ud-din Nuggur and at a place where a high ridge commanded an iron suspension bridge. It was found afterwards that the rebels meant to fight the two British forces in detail before they could effect a junction. The generalship of the idea was good, but the sepoys did not count on the pent-up wrath of the British soldiers, who were burning to avenge their murdered countrymen and dishonored countrywomen, for it was now becoming known that many a fair English lady had met a fate worse than death ere sword or bullet stilled her anguish.

A company of the 60th Rifles dashed forward to seize the bridge, Lieutenant Light and his men took up the enemy’s challenge with their heavy eighteen-pounders, and Colonel Mackenzie and Major Tombs, at the head of two batteries of horse artillery, crossed the river and turned the left flank of the sepoy force. Then the Rifles extended and charged, the mutineers yielded, and Colonel Custance with his dragoons sabered them mercilessly for some miles.

Next morning, Whit-Sunday, while the chaplains were conducting the burial service over those who had fallen, the mutineers came out of Delhi again. A severe action began instantly. Tombs had two horses shot under him, and thirteen out of fifty men in his battery were killed or wounded. But the issue was never in doubt. After three hours’ hard fighting the rebels broke and fled. So those men in Meerut could give a good account of themselves when permitted! Actually, they won the two first battles of the campaign.

Exhausted by two days’ strenuous warfare in the burning sun, they could not take up the pursuit. The men were resting on the field when a battalion of Ghoorkahs, the little fighting men of Nepaul, arrived under the command of Colonel Reid. They had marched by way of Bulandshahr, and Malcolm heard to his dismay that the native infantry detachment stationed there, aided by the whole population of the district, had committed the wildest excesses.

Yet Winifred and her uncle had passed through that town on the road to Cawnpore. Aligarh, too, was in flames, said Reid, and there was no communication open with Agra, the seat of Government for the North-West Provinces. There was a bare possibility that the Maynes might have reached Agra, or that Nana Sahib had protected them for his own sake. Such slender hopes brought no comfort. Black despair sat in Malcolm’s heart until the Brigadier sent for him and ordered him to take charge of the guard that would escort the records and treasure from Meerut to Agra. He hailed this dangerous mission with gloomy joy. Love had no place in a soldier’s life, he told himself. Henceforth he must remember Winifred only when his sword was at the throat of some wretched mutineer appealing for mercy.

He went to his tent to supervise the packing of his few belongings. His bearer,[5] a Punjabi Mohammedan, who cursed the sepoys fluently for disturbing the country during the hot weather, handed him a note which had been brought by a camp follower.

It was written in Persi-Arabic script, a sort of Arabic shorthand that demands the exercise of time and patience ere it can be deciphered by one not thoroughly acquainted with it. Thinking it was a request for employment which he could not offer, Malcolm stuffed it carelessly into a pocket. He rode to Meerut, placed himself at the head of the 8th Irregular Cavalry, a detachment whose extraordinary fidelity has already been narrated, and set forth next morning with his train of bullock carts and their escort.

He called the first halt in the village where he had parted from Winifred. The headman professed himself unable to give any information, but the application of a stirrup leather to his bare back while his wrists were tied to a cart wheel soon loosened his tongue.

The king’s hunting lodge was empty, he whined; and the Roshinara Begum had gone to Delhi. Nana Sahib’s cavalcade went south soon after the Begum’s departure, and a moullah had told him, the headman, that the Nana had hastened through Aligarh on his way to Cawnpore, not turning aside to visit Agra, which was fifty miles down the Bombay branch of the Grand Trunk Road.

Malcolm drew a negative comfort from the moullah’s tale. That night he encamped near a fair-sized village which was ominously denuded of men. Approaching a native hut to ask for a piece of charcoal wherewith to light a cigar, he happened to look inside. To his very great surprise he saw, standing in a corner, a complete suit of European armor, made of tin, it is true, but a sufficiently bewildering “find” in a Goojer hovel.

A woman came running from a neighbor’s house. While giving him the charcoal she hastily closed the rude door. She pretended not to understand him when he sought an explanation of the armor, whereupon he seized her, and led her, shrieking, among his own men. The commotion brought other villagers on the scene, as he guessed it would. A few fierce threats, backed by a liberal display of naked steel, quickly evoked the curious fact that nearly all the able-bodied inhabitants “had gone to see the sahib-log[6] dance.”

Even Malcolm’s native troops were puzzled by this story, but a further string of terrifying words and more saber flourishing led to a direct statement that the white people who were to “dance” had been captured near the village quite a week earlier and imprisoned in a ruined tomb about a mile from the road. It was risky work to leave the valuable convoy for an instant, but Malcolm felt that he must probe this mystery. Taking half a dozen men with him, and compelling the woman to act as guide, he went to the tomb in the dark.

The building, a mosque-like structure of considerable size, was situated in the midst of a grove of mango trees. A clear space in front of the tomb was lighted with oil lamps and bonfires. It was packed with uproarious natives, and Malcolm’s astonished gaze rested on three European acrobats doing some feat of balancing. A clown was cracking jokes in French, some nuns were singing dolefully, and a trio of girls, wearing the conventional gauze and spangles of circus riders, were standing near a couple of piebald ponies.

He and his men dashed in among the audience and the Goojers ran for dear life when they caught sight of a sahib at the head of an armed party. The performers and the nuns nearly died of fright, believing that their last hour had surely come. But they soon recovered from their fear only to collapse more completely from joy. A French circus, it appeared, had camped near a party of nuns in the village on the main road, and were captured there when the news came that the English were swept out of existence. Most fortunately for themselves the nuns were regarded as part of the show, and the villagers, after robbing all of them, penned them in the mosque and made them give a nightly performance. There were five men and three women in the circus troupe, and among the four nuns was the grave reverend mother of a convent.

Malcolm brought them to the village and caused it to be made known that unless every article of value and every rupee in money stolen from these unfortunate people, together with a heavy fine, were brought to him by daybreak, he would not only fire each hut and destroy the standing crops, but he would also hang every adult male belonging to the place he could lay hands on.

These hereditary thieves could appreciate a man who spoke like that. They met him fairly and paid in full. When the convoy moved off, even that amazing suit of armor, which was used for the state entry of the circus into a town, was strapped on to the back of a trick pony.

The nuns, he ascertained, were coming from Fategarh to Umballa and they had met the great retinue of Nana Sahib below Aligarh. With him were two Europeans, a young lady and an elderly gentleman, but they were traveling so rapidly that it was impossible to learn who they were or whither they were going.

Here, then, was really good news. Like every other Englishman in India Malcolm believed that the Mutiny was confined to a very small area, of which his own station was the center. He thought that if Winifred and her uncle reached Cawnpore they would be quite safe.

He brightened up so thoroughly that he quite enjoyed a sharp fight next day when the budmashes of Bulandshahr regarded the straggling convoy as an easy prey.

There were three or four such affairs ere they reached Agra, and his Frenchmen proved themselves to be soldiers as well as acrobats. On the evening of the 2d of June he marched his cavalcade into the splendid fortress immortalized by its marble memorials of the great days of the Mogul empire.

The fact that a young subaltern had brought a convoy from Meerut was seized on by the weak and amiable John Colvin, Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces, as a convincing proof of his theory that the bulk of the native army might be trusted, and that order would soon be restored. Each day he was sending serenely confident telegrams to Calcutta and receiving equally reassuring ones from a fatuous Viceroy. It was with the utmost difficulty that his wiser subordinates got him to disarm the sepoy regiments in Agra itself. He vehemently assured the Viceroy that the worst days of the outbreak were over and issued a proclamation offering forgiveness to all mutineers who gave up their arms, “except those who had instigated others to revolt, or taken part in the murder of Europeans.”

Such a man was sure to regard Malcolm’s bold journey from the wrong point of view. So delighted was he that he gave the sowars two months’ pay, lauded Malcolm in the Gazette, and forthwith despatched him on a special mission to General Sir Hugh Wheeler at Cawnpore, to whom he recommended Frank for promotion and appointment as aide-de-camp.

This curious sequence of events led to Malcolm’s following Winifred Mayne along the road she had taken exactly three weeks earlier. The route to Cawnpore lay through Etawah, a place where revolt had already broken out, but which had been evacuated by the mutineers, who, like those at Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Mainpuri, Meerut, and a score of other towns, ran off to Delhi after butchering all the Europeans within range.

With a small escort of six troopers, his servant, and two pack-horses, he traveled fast. As night was falling on June 4th, he re-entered the Grand Trunk Road some three miles north of Bithoor, where, all unknown to him, Nana Sahib’s splendid palace stood on the banks of the Ganges.

It was his prudent habit to halt in small villages only. Towns might be traversed quickly without much risk, as even the tiniest display of force insured safety, but it was wise not to permit the size of his escort to be noted at leisure, when a surprise attack might be made in the darkness.

Therefore, expecting to arrive at Cawnpore early next day, he elected not to push on to Bithoor, and proposed to pass the night under the branches of a great pipal tree. Chumru, his Mohammedan bearer, was a good cook, in addition to his many other acquirements. Having purchased, or made his master pay for, which is not always the same thing in India, a small kid (by which please understand a young goat) in the village, he lit a fire, slew the kid, to the accompaniment of an appropriate verse from the Koran, and compounded an excellent stew.

A native woman brought some chupatties and milk, and Malcolm, being sharp set with hunger, ate as a man can only eat when he is young, and in splendid health, and has ridden hard all day.

He had a cigar left, too, and he was searching his pockets for a piece of paper to light it when he brought forth that Persi-Arabic letter which reached him at the close of the second battle of Ghazi-ud-din Nuggur.

He was on the point of rolling it into a spill, but some subtle influence stopped him. He rose, walked to Chumru’s fire, and lit the cigar with a burning stick. Then summoning a smart young jemadar with whom he had talked a good deal during the journey, he asked him to read the chit. The woman who supplied the chupatties fetched a tiny lamp. She held it while the trooper bent over the strange scrawl, and ran his eyes along it to learn the context.

And this is what he read: