"Now, if you please!"
Someone in the thick of the smoke and the flashes heard the yells and curses and raised his cap--a last salute, as it were, to the school and schoolmaster. A final dismissal to the scholars--a thousand of them or so--about to finish their lesson of what men can do to hold their own. And someone else, standing beside the lemon-bush, bent over that faithful black streak, then ran for dear life from the hissing of that snake of fire flashing to the powder magazine.
A faint sob, a whispering gasp of horror, came from the thousand and odd; but above it came a roar, a rush, a rending. A little puff of white smoke went skyward first, and then slowly, majestically, a great cloud of rose-red dust grew above the ruins, to hang--a corona glittering in the slant sunbeams--over the school, the schoolmasters, and the scholars.
It hung there for hours. To those who know the story it seems to hang there still--a bloody pall for the many; for the Nine, a crown indeed.
[CHAPTER V.]
SUNSET.
"What's that?"
The question sprung to every lip; yet all knew the answer. The magazine had saved itself.
But in the main-guard, not six hundred yards off, where the very ground rocked and the walls shook, the men and women, pent up since noon, looked at each other when the first shock was over, feeling that here was the end of inaction. Here was a distinct, definite challenge to Fate, and what would come of it? It was now close on to four o'clock; the day was over, the darkness at hand. What would it bring them? If Meerut, with its two thousand, was so sore bested that it could not spare one man to Delhi, what could they, a mere handful, hope for save annihilation?
Yet even Mrs. Seymour only clasped her baby closer, and said nothing. For there was no lack of courage anywhere. And Kate, with another child in her arms, paused as she laid it down, asleep at last, upon an officer's coat, to feel a certain relief. If they were to fare thus, that bitter self-reproach and agonizing doubt for vanished Sonny was unavailing. His chance might well be better than theirs.