"To horse! To horse! Let the comrades be rescued first; and then----"
The word had been spoken. Nothing so very soul-stirring after all. No consideration of caste or religion, patriotism or ambition. Only a taunt from a pair of painted lips.
[BOOK III.]
FROM DUSK TO DAWN.
[CHAPTER I.]
NIGHT.
"To the rescue! To the rescue!"
The cry was no more than that at first. To the rescue of the eighty-five martyrs, the blows upon whose shackles still seemed to echo in their comrades' ears. Even so, the cry heard by Soma as he passed through the bazaar meant insubordination--the greatest crime he knew--and sent him flying to his own lines to give the alarm. Sent him thence by instinct, oblivious of that promise for the 31st--or perhaps mindful of it and seeing in this outburst a mere riot--to his Colonel's house with twenty or thirty comrades clamoring for their arms, protesting that with them they would soon settle matters for the Huzoors. But suspicion was in the air, and even the Colonel of the 11th could not trust all his regiment. Ready for church, he flung himself on his horse and raced back with the clamoring men to the lines.
And by this time there was another race going on. Captain Craigie's faithful troop of the 3d Cavalry were racing after his shout of "Dau-ro! bhai-yan, Dau-ro!" (Ride, brothers, ride!) toward the jail in the hopes of averting the rescue of their comrades. For, as the records are careful to say, he and his troop "were dressed as for parade"--not a buckle or a belt awry--ready to combat the danger before others had grasped it, and swiftly, without a thought, went for the first offenders. Too late! the doors were open, the birds flown.
What next was to be done? What but to bring the troop back without a defaulter--despite the taunts of escaping convicts, the temptations of comrades flushed by success--to the parade ground for orders. But there was no one to give them, for when the 3d Cavalry led the van of mutiny at Meerut their Colonel was in the European cantonment as field officer of the week, and there he "conceived it his duty to remain." Perhaps rightly. And it is also conceivable that his absence made no difference, since it is, palpably, an easier task to make a regiment mutiny than to bring it back to its allegiance.