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Updated: June 18, 2025
He spat in the gutter. Was it yesterday he had lain in the rifle-butts over Salisbury? Slightly aggrieved, he wondered why he was not back there now. "I ought to have written first," he reflected. "Here is my money gone. I cannot move. The Elliots have, as it were, practically robbed me." That was the only grudge he retained against them.
For movement there were a few squads of Militia recruits being drilled by the trumpet-voiced sergeants; and for music there was the ring of a hundred rifle-butts striking the ground together, the tramp and click of many feet, and the clatter of the colonel's horse as he rode across the yard.
Just inside the gate the guard were falling in, preparatory to the arrival of the relief, and something in their smart appearance, and in the very clank of their rifle-butts upon the flagstones, stirred his heart; yes, that was the calling he meant to follow. He strode off along the Hornalby road, whistling a lively tune, and conjuring up bright mental pictures of the life before him.
The doomed men then stood to attention, and the soldiers examined the breeches of their rifles to make sure that they were properly loaded. Then came the word "Ready!" and the twenty rifles came up to the soldiers' hips as though by machinery. At the second word of command the barrels glinted in the sun as the men planted the rifle-butts in the hollow of their shoulders.
There had been a royal dog-fight in the ravine at the back of the rifle-butts, between Learoyd's Jock and Ortheris's Blue Rot both mongrel Rampur hounds, chiefly ribs and teeth. It lasted for twenty happy, howling minutes, and then Blue Rot collapsed and Ortheris paid Learoyd three rupees, and we were all very thirsty.
They passed in and the massive door was shut and barred, while an instant later at least half-a-dozen savages ran up against it and began to thunder on it with their rifle-butts and tomahawks. "To your windows!" shouted Jackson, as he sprang up the wooden stair-case, three steps at a time. "Fresh rifles here, Mary!" "Yes, father," came in a silvery and most unwarlike voice from the hall below.
I heard cries of agony, shouts, curses, but there was no pause. I could mark their faces now, cruel, angry, revengeful; the hands that grasped the veranda railings; the leaping bodies; the rifle-butts uplifted to batter down our frail defences. As trapped tigers we fought, hurling them back from the windows, slashing, clubbing, striking with fist and steel.
They came and changed the guard two hours after dawn, to the accompaniment of a lot of hawking and spitting, orders growled through the mist, and the crash of rifle-butts grounding on the rock path.
"Shoot him!" Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him in the back to help him along, Jean was haled before an officer, who there and then signed an order of arrest. He had been in solitary confinement in a cell at the depôt for sixteen days now or was it fifteen? he was not sure. The hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony and tediousness.
Not a dozen words were spoken, but in an instant the swords of the officers leaped from their scabbards, and then, obeying some low-toned commands, the right and left flank companies, simply lifting their rifle-butts, enough to clear the ground, changed front to right and left respectively, thus bringing them facing the outer ends of the train-sheds.
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