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It was Shaitan, young Bellairs' Khaubuli charger, with his haunches under him, plunging across the flagstones, through the black-dark archway, out on the plain beyond in answer to the long, sharp-roweled spurs of the Risaldar Mahommed Khan. Dawn broke and the roofs of old Hanadra became resplendent with the varied colors of turbans and pugrees and shawls.
As though the rising sun had loosed the spell, a myriad tongues, of women chiefly, rose in a babel of clamor, and the few men who had been left in. Hanadra by the night's armed exodus came all together and growled prophetically in undertones. Now was the day of days, when that part of India, at least, should cast off the English yoke. To the temple!
Alone, I am an old man not without honor, but of little use; with twelve young blades behind me, though, these Hindu rabble " "Do you really mean, Mahommed Khan, that you think Hanadra here will rise?" "The moment you are gone, sahib!" "Then, that settles it! The memsahib rides with me!" "Nay, listen, sahib! Of a truth, thou art a hot-head as thy father was before thee! Thus will it be better.
"Where is she?" "Still at Hanadra, sir I " "Let the men fall in! Call the roll at once!" "There was nothing in my orders, sir, about " But Colonel Carter cut him short with a motion and turned his back on him. "Much obliged, Sergeant," he said, slipping his wounded arm into an improvised sling. "How many wagons have we here?" "Four, sir." "And horses?" "All shot dead except your charger, sir."
The mutinous sepoys had their rifles with them; there were guns from the ramparts of Hanadra that were capable of quite efficient service at close range; and practically every man in the dense-packed rebel line had a firearm of some kind. It was only in cavalry and discipline and pluck that the British force had the advantage, and the cavalry had already charged once and had been repulsed.
"How did you hear what my orders were?" "My half-brother came hurrying with the news, sahib. I hastened! My horse lies dead one kos from Hanadra here!" The lieutenant laughed. "At last, Mahommed? That poor old screw of yours? So he's dead at last, eh? So his time had come at last!" "We be not all rich men who serve the Raj!" said the Risaldar with dignity. "Ay, sahib, his time was come!
But I would do the same, and you men all know it, for any soldier's wife in my command, or any English woman in India. We will march now on Hanadra. No! No demonstrations, please!" His uplifted left hand was just in time to check a roar of answering approval. "Didn't I tell you so?" exclaimed a gunner to the man beside him in an undertone. "Him leave a white woman to face this sort o' music?
They turned to cheer the explosion and then settled down to march in deadly earnest and, if need be, to fight a rear-guard action all the way. And in the opposite direction one solitary gunner rode, hell-bent-for-leather, with a note addressed to "O. C. Jundhra." It was short and to the point. It ran: Have blown up magazine; Mrs. Bellairs at Hanadra; have gone to rescue her.
Bellairs, or anybody else of ours, is in Hanadra, she or they are either dead by now or else prisoners. And if they are to be rescued by force, the larger the force employed the better. If you were to attack with your two companies before I reached you, you probably would be repulsed, and would, I think, endanger the lives of any prisoners that the enemy may hold.
Hurry, man! For the love of anything you like to name, get a move on!" "Trot, march! "Canter!" Bellairs was thinking of his wife, alone in Hanadra, unprotected except by a sixty-year-old Risaldar and a half-brother who was a civilian and an unknown quantity. There were cold chills running down his spine and a sickening sensation in his stomach.
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