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The English church, we afterwards heard, was first fired, then the Roman Catholic chapel, our mess-house, and nineteen other bungalows. The sepoys, mostly of the 45th Native Infantry, attended by dozens of badmashes, marched unchallenged through the station with lighted torches fixed on long bamboo poles, with which they set fire to the thatched roofs of the various houses.
Only a handful of Europeans there; an American mission; and no troops. So the 'mish' people begged him to come in and politely wave his official wand. You must be very polite to badmashes these days, if you're a mere Sahib; or you hear of it from some little Tin God sitting safe in his office, hundreds of miles away.
Officers and men were grieved, no less than annoyed, at the state of inaction in which we had been kept, and an uneasy feeling prevailed that during the night the mutinous sepoys, aided by the badmashes, or bad characters, who swarmed in the bazaars and city of Ferozepore, would, under cover of the darkness, run riot over the cantonment, without our being called on to interfere.
The sepoys, after their work of destruction, must have left during the night, and were now probably well on their way to Delhi, while the badmashes who had assisted them had returned quietly to their occupations in the bazaars of the city. The cantonment presented a complete scene of desolation.
"Well, Ramji Daji, what's this I hear about a robbery at the Museum yesterday?" asked the doctor of the assistant curator. "Ah, Sahib, I am very sorry, but the badmashes stole those pieces of strangely carved stones you found on the Salt Range mountains, and also another piece, which was lying near them on the table here," answered Ramji Daji. "But what in the world did they carry them off for?
At the outbreak of May 11, it had been plundered and burnt by the mutinous sepoys and badmashes, who also in like manner had destroyed every house belonging to the Europeans in the suburbs of Delhi and the adjoining cantonment. Of the murders that then took place I shall have something to say hereafter, when writing the history of a young school-fellow whose sister was killed by the insurgents.
"I suppose there's no doubt that Sir Edmund will accept Sher Singh's submission on these terms?" asked Gerrard gloomily. "None whatever, I should say, judging by the way he received them just now." "And this is the end of it, then! Sher Singh gets all he wanted at the price of a few rupees to the heirs of the badmashes he has bribed to take his guilt upon them."
The men are badmashes; Calcutta is unhappily in a disturbed state." "Badmashes or not, they came from your house if this is your house." "It is my house, sahib. My name is Omichand. I must inquire how the badmashes came to be in my compound. "And what about the two men?" "The two men, sahib?" "Yes, the two Europeans who came first from the house, and were protected by these ruffians?"
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