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Updated: June 14, 2025
"Let Gooja Singh alone." So I went and grew very busy ordering the column. In twenty minutes we were under way, with a screen of horsemen several hundred yards ahead and another little mounted rear-guard. But when the order had been given to resume the march and the carts were squeaking along in single file, I rode to his side again with a question.
I myself let the sea into her hold!" Gooja Singh was silent for about a minute, and although it was dark and I could not see him. I knew exactly the expression of his face wrinkled thus, and with the lower lip thrust out, so! "Any more questions?" asked Ranjoor Singh, and by that time Gooja Singh had thought again.
"This for Gooja Singh when I set eyes on him!" said not one trooper but every living man, licking a cartridge and slipping it into the breech chamber as we started. We did not take the track up which the Kurdish chief had galloped, but the ten guides led us by a dreadful route round almost the half of a circle, ever mounting upward.
So I took thought, and used discretion, and chose twelve troopers whom I drafted into Gooja Singh's command by twos and threes, he not suspecting. By ones and twos and threes I took them apart and tested them, saying much the same to each. Said I, "Who mistrusts our sahib any longer?" And because I had chosen them well they each made the same answer. "Nay," said they, "we were fools.
"No," said he, "but I am OF the regiment. I am not a man running back and forth, false to both sides!" I was not taken by surprise. Something of that sort sooner or later I knew must come, but I would have preferred another time and place. "Be thou go-between then, Gooja Singh!" said I. "I accepted only under strong persuasion. Gladly I relinquish! Go thou, and carry thy message to Ranjoor Singh!"
Peering into the dark and wondering that so great a city as Stamboul should show so few lights, I observed the Kurdish sentinels posted about the dock. "Those are to prevent us from going ashore until their friends come!" said I, and they snarled at me like angry wolves. "We could easily rush ashore and bayonet every one of them!" said Gooja Singh.
I had scarcely finished that when Gooja Singh came, and I cursed under my breath; but openly I appeared pleased to see him. "It is well you came!" said I. "Thus I am saved the necessity of sending one to bring you. Our sahib is asleep," I said, "and has made over the command to me until he shall awake again." "He sleeps very suddenly!" said Gooja Singh, and he stood eying me with suspicion.
There was to be, one way or the other, a decision reached on that spot as to who sought honor and who sought shame. He himself submitted to no judgment. It was the regiment that stood on trial! A weak man would have stood and explained himself. Presently Ramnarain Singh, seeing that Gooja Singh was likely to get too much credit with the men, took up the cudgels and stood forward.
And when the troopers asked what that might mean, he asked how many of them in the Punjab had seen a goat tied to a stake to lure a panther. The suggestion made them think. Then, pretending to praise him, letting fall no word that could be thrown back in his teeth, he condemned Ranjoor Singh for a worse traitor than any had yet believed him. Gooja Singh was a man with a certain subtlety.
Of the other four, the next was Ramnarain Singh, the shortest as to inches of us all, but perhaps the most active on his feet. A great talker. Brave in battle, as one must be to be daffadar of Outram's Own, but too assertive of his own opinion. He and Gooja Singh were ever at outs, resentful of each other's claim to wisdom.
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