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In the vacant caverns, whence the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance of the barren years.
The old man's slumbers were haunted with the olden memories of a day of doom, the day when the bodies of the sacred Princes of Oude lay naked in the glaring sun as they were despoiled after Hodson's pistol had done its bloody work. "They may have taken them all from him, these English are greedy spoilers," muttered the crafty old man, as his head fell upon the silken cushions with a curse.
That Hodson's superiors intimated that India was getting to his liver when he wrote, very cautiously, of this obsession, made no difference; and clinging to his distrust, he achieved something. After all it was rather strange that the matter had not been taken out of his hands, but it wasn't. A sort of departmental formula running; "Commissioner So-and-So has the matter in hand refer to him."
Hodson's whip cracking on the shoulders of the poor little blubbering wretches, and Sir Pitt, seeing that the malefactors were in custody, drove on to the hall. All the servants were ready to meet us, and . . . Here, my dear, I was interrupted last night by a dreadful thumping at my door: and who do you think it was? Sir Pitt Crawley in his night-cap and dressing-gown, such a figure!
"I must be free," I muttered; and dragging Hodson's handkerchief from his neck, I bound it to my own, and then making them fast beneath his arms, felt among the woodwork till I could find a place where I could pass them through, so that I could secure him from slipping down, or being swept away by the ebbing and flowing of the water.
Devilish few of the chaps he knew babbled much about love and being batty over a girl that is, the girls they married. Then the bearer brought Hodson's salaams to the Captain. And Hodson was a Civil Servant in excelsis. He took to bed with him his Form D and Form C even the "D. O.", the Demi Official business, and worried over it when he should have slept or read himself to sleep.
The two girls looked serious as they walked into the street again. Somehow they felt aggrieved. "If the rest haven't started, Magsie and Vi might take us behind them on their bicycles," suggested Wendy dubiously. "Hodson's would know if they've gone. They were to call for some parcels there." It proved a forlorn hope.
Practical success in life depends more upon physical health than is generally imagined. Hodson, of Hodson's Horse, writing home to a friend in England, said, "I believe if I get on well in India, it will be owing, physically speaking, to a sound digestion."
Hodson's orders were precise as to the fate of these blood-thirsty ruffians, and though his name has been vilified and his reputation tarnished by so-called humanitarians for the course he adopted in ridding the world of the miscreants, he was upheld in the deed by the whole Delhi army, men in every respect better qualified to form a judgment in this particular than the sentimental beings at home who denounced with horror this perfectly justifiable act of speedy and condign punishment.
To Lumsden and his men was entrusted the duty of arresting and deporting the firebrand princess. As taking part in this mission, first appears in the annals of the Guides the name of Lieutenant W.S.R. Hodson, afterwards famous for his many deeds of daring, and whose name still lives as the intrepid and dashing leader of Hodson's Horse.
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