"Take him down, dear, will you, and tie him up?" he said.
The little endearing word moved her more than the command.
"Come!" she said, as though it were rather the servant than herself that was responsible for the trouble, and walked straight down to the doolie.
The enemy had made another dash on the centre after the sortie, and as it was driven back the signal was given Dore for which he had so eagerly been waiting, Terrington's hand having been forced by the increasing number of the enemy in front of him, the Guides being still a long way to the rear.
A bugle call replied to the signal, and Dore's men opened fire instantly on the crowded road beneath them.
The Saris turned at the sound, to find themselves penned between two lines of fire and the precipices of the defile.
It was little wonder that panic seized them; the long deferred disclosure of the trap adding to their apprehensions. Those nearest Dore's ridge dashed for the gap without an attempt at resistance, and those in front, seeing their supports in flight, fell back, firing wildly in both directions.
The Bakót men finding the foe in retreat began to shoot with more effect, but Terrington, trusting rather to their knives for slaughter and feeling that the decisive moment was come, signalled to the Guides, still three miles away, to press forward, and ordered a general advance.
The Dogras, being on the lower ground, were the first to get within thrusting distance, and closed on a terrified huddle of men swinging this way and that in frenzied efforts to escape like a frightened flock of sheep, and crying out for mercy from the bayonets that pierced them from behind. The mercy meted out to them was the mercy of the Durbar—a swift end, and the scorn of born fighters in their ears; and, as the Bakót levies descended with their crooked knives upon the scurrying flanks, the Saris flung away their arms and fought with each other to escape the avengers.
Terrington stopped the pursuit with the utmost difficulty as it came under the fire which Dore was pouring upon the fugitives, and sent volley after volley with deadly effect into the maddened wedge of men penned in the gap. It was absolute butchery, and the struggling men fell to the bullets in sheaves across the road, the life blown out of them at three hundred paces.