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The third column, consisting of two hundred men of the Fifty-second Regiment, two hundred and fifty men of the Ghoorka Kumaan battalion, and five hundred men of the First Punjaub Infantry, under Colonel Campbell, were to assault by the Cashmere gate, which was to be blown open by the engineers.
More than this the old man could not say, and presently he fell asleep; but from the wild man Muata learnt that his mother had indeed been at the village. "And you will want to leave us, chief?" said Mr. Hume, when the story had been straightened out. "Ow aye. Shall a son leave the mother who bore him through the dangers of the wood? I will follow;" and his eyes lingered on the Ghoorka knife.
By the help of a "Ghoorka" guide, which they had hired, they were not long in finding one; but as there was no curious or particular incident connected with its capture, the journal of Alexis is silent upon the affair: it is only recorded that the animal was started from a thicket of rhododendron bushes, and shot down while endeavouring to make its escape.
Germany has now learned and the lesson was apparently needed, obvious as it would have been to a sanely governed nation that when it comes to shoving and shooting, Germany instantly loses all the advantages of her high civilization, because France and England, cultured or uncultured, can shove and shoot as well or beter than she, whilst as to slashing and stabbing, their half barbarous Turco and Ghoorka slaves can cut the Prussian Guard to bits, in spite of the unquestionable superiority of Wagner's music to theirs.
I stood there, a single white man, armed only with one revolver, answerable for the lives of two English ladies, and accompanied by a cringing out-caste Ghoorka cook and half-a-dozen doubtful Nepaulese bearers. To fly was impossible. We were fairly trapped. There was nothing for it but to wait and put a bold face on our utter helplessness. I turned to our spoilt child.
It was Ram Lal's easy task to purvey luxuries to the imperious Briton, to hold the extravagant underlings in his usurious clutches, to be at peace with Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, Pathan, Ghoorka, Persian, and Armenian, and to blur his easy-going Mohammedanism in a generous participation in all sins of omission and commission. A many-sided man!
Once in Nepal, where he had gone to shoot, he had passed a month quite happily with only a Ghoorka servant who could speak no English. To those who asked him if he had not been horribly bored, he had always answered: "Not a bit; did a lot of thinking." With Miltoun's trouble he had the professional sympathy of a brother and the natural intolerance of a confirmed bachelor.
In the first place, the notches on the branches were too small; and in the next, the tunnel was too low for their height, so that they had to stoop; while it was also evident that the overland swing-bridges between the trees were too frail for their weight. They quickly, therefore, resorted to their Ghoorka knives and to the rope.
"Wow! and for the big knife;" and the chief polished up his Ghoorka blade, while the boys greased the rifles and stared at the chief's wife, thinking, as they stared, of the adventures which she had been through since she fled from the kraal of her husband, driven out by the slave-hunters.
In the western Himalayas there is an admixture of Ghoorka mountaineers, Hindoos from the south, Sikhs from Lahore, and Mahometans from the old empire of the Moguls; and here, also, are to be found, in full profession, the three great representative religions of Asia Mahometan, Buddhist, and Brahmin.
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