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Updated: June 2, 2025
Once more they made their way through the streets of Cynthiana, where the acrid smoke of burning caught at throats, adding to the torturous thirst which dried a man's mouth when he tore cartridge paper with his teeth. Drew and Croxton took sketchy orders from Captain Quirk, their eyes red-rimmed with fatigue above their powder-blackened lips and chins.
"In God's name, how came you here, and in this garb?" he finally asks. Weak with sickness, suffering, and the horrible fright he has undergone, the bully of former days simply shudders and cringes now. He crouches at Abbot's feet, gazing fearfully around him at the circle of vengeful, powder-blackened faces. "Don't let them touch me, Mr. Abbot! Oh, for God's sake help me. I'm 'most dead, anyhow.
Perhaps with my powder-blackened face and my blood-stained hands I seemed a different Gerard to the young captain whom they had made game of the night before. "Good morning, gentlemen," said I. "I regret exceedingly if I have kept you waiting, but I have not been master of my own time." They said nothing, but they still scanned me with curious eyes.
Probably he had overheard us; but while we were talking of the entry of the Prussians, the old gentleman was thinking of the triumphant return of the French troops, for which he had so long been waiting Mac Mahon marching down the avenue in the midst of flowers, his son at the marshal's side, and he himself on his balcony wearing his full dress uniform as he did at Lutzen, saluting the riddled flags and the powder-blackened eagles.
Her thoughts had wandered to the far Transvaal and the battle-field where first she had set eyes on Gurn, the sergeant of artillery with powder-blackened face; and then to the homeward voyage on the mighty steamer that bore them across the blue sea, towards the dull white cliffs of England. Gurn's thoughts followed hers. "Out there! Yes; and then on the vast ocean, on the ship homeward bound!
Howard and Raymond were to be actors in that terrible drama not yet played; stripped and powder-blackened at their guns, they were perhaps doomed to go down with their ship and find their graves in the Caribbean. Before them lay untold possibilities of wounds and mutilation, of disease, suffering, and horror.
They were followed by the natives, who fired on them repeatedly from a safe distance, and again and again the dead had to be east into the stream. Yet when a Sepoy boat ran against a sandbank, twenty or so of the powder-blackened Englishmen sprang out into the water and raced with fury to kill them, though the boat contained three times their own number.
But it was a hard and dreadful lesson; and I saw men crying, faces hidden in their powder-blackened hands, as the dying General was borne through the ranks, lying gray and motionless on his hemlock litter. And this is all that I myself witnessed of that shameful ambuscade and murderous combat, fought some two miles north of the dirty camp, and now known as the Battle of Oriskany.
'The memsahib will never be better, said Tooni, sorrowfully; 'her rice is finished in the earth. The memsahib will die. She agreed to go to the ghat, though, and went back into the hut to wait for the ox-cart while Abdul cooked a meal on the powder-blackened ground with the last of the millet, and gave thanks to Allah. There was no room for Tooni to ride when they started.
You would hardly have known this tousled crowd for the same dandy crew that had smiled so flippantly upon me at sunrise, though they smiled as flippantly now with faces powder-blackened, hair and eyelashes matted and gummed with sweat and dust, and shoulders and thighs caked with grime.
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