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Cumner, the Governor, and McDermot heard the cry of the hillsmen, too, and took heart. Boonda Broke tried to divide his force, so that half of them should face the hillsmen, and half the Residency; but there was not time enough; and his men fought as they were attacked, those in front against Pango Dooni, those behind against Cumner.
The hillsmen rode upon the frenzied rebels, and were swallowed up by the great mass of them, so that they seemed lost. But slowly, heavily, and with ferocious hatred, they drove their hard path on.
Now in the Palace yard his body lay under a canopy, the flags of Mandakan and England over his breast, twenty of his own naked body-guard stood round, and four of his high chiefs stood at his head and four at his feet, and little lads ran softly past, crying: "Corn and tears and wine for the dead!" And behind all these again were placed the dark battalions and the hillsmen.
Even as he spoke the hillsmen gave the word, and two score men ran down behind the rocks, mounted, and were instantly away by the road that led to the Koongat Bridge. The tall hillsman turned to the lad. "You are beaten by travel," said he. "Come, eat and drink, and rest." "I have sworn to breakfast where Pango Dooni bides, and there only will I rest and eat," answered the lad.
A few hundred native troops and a handful of hillsmen rode up and down, and at the Residency fifty men kept guard under command of Sergeant Doolan of the artillery his superior officers and the rest of his comrades were at the Palace.
At the Residency another thousand men encamped, with a hundred hillsmen and eighty English, under the command of Tang-a-Dahit and McDermot. By the Fountain of the Sweet Waters, which is over against the Tomb where the Dakoon should sleep, another thousand men were patrolled, with a hundred hillsmen, commanded by a kinsman of Pango Dooni.
The city was saved from the Red Plague, and the people, gone mad with joy, would have carried Cumner's Son to the Palace on their shoulders, but he walked beside the beggar to his father's house, hillsmen in front and English soldiers behind; and wasted and ghostly, from riding and fighting and watching, he threw himself upon the bed in his own room, and passed, as an eyelid blinks, into a deep sleep.
The hillsmen clove the besiegers through like a piece of pasteboard, and turning, rode back again through the broken ranks, their battle-call ringing high above the clash of steel. Again they turned at the Palace wall, and, gathering impetus, they rode at the detached and battered segments of the miserable horde, and once more cut them down, then furiously galloped towards the Residency.
In one household she came upon a time-worn set of the "British Poets" up to the nineteenth century, and such was the sturdy character of the hillsmen that she tossed the theory aside that they were the descendants of the riffraff of the Old World, tossed it as a miserable slander and looked upon them as the same blood as the people of the Blue-grass, the valleys, and the plains beyond.
We cannot visualize the shambling but eager mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports him faithfully: "Wisht you'd 'zamine this rock fer me I heern tell you was one o' them 'sperts." Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. They are fond of grace syllables: "I gotta me a deck o' cyards."
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