Down at the Ghaut the work was truly speeding well, but when the Nana’s message arrived it stopped as far as the women were concerned; and about one hundred and thirty women and children—some fearfully wounded, others half drowned and dripping with the slime of the Ganges—were carried back in captivity to Cawnpore.
Thirty-nine boats had been destroyed; but there was one that got into the fairway of the stream, and down on the dark bosom of the waters it drifted, a lonely waif. There were no boatmen, there were no oars, there was no rudder, but there were hearts of steel on board; heroes who would die, ay, suffer death a hundred times before they would surrender. That solitary boat contained about eighty men—such men that, if they had had a fair chance, not all the legions of the accursed Nana could have conquered them. Slowly it drifted on between the banks. Hissing shot and burning arrows were discharged at it in showers, but it seemed almost as if it had been surrounded with a charm, for it drifted on unscathed. Next a blazing budgerow was sent after it, but that failed to harm it, and its occupants, slender as was the chance, began to think that they would escape. But as the sun commenced to decline, and burnish the river with his golden rays, a boat, filled with about sixty men, was sent in pursuit, with orders from Tantia Topee to slaughter every Englishman. The lonely boat grounded on a sand-bank. Hope sank again. On came the would-be destroyers, and their boat stuck on the same bank. Then occurred a last grand burst of courage—courage even in death, and which is always so conspicuous in British heroism. On the bows of the pursuer there stood up a tall, powerful Sepoy, and, in a loud voice, cried:
“In the name of the Nana Sahib, I call upon you to surrender.”
He might as well have called upon the winds to stay their course, or the tides to cease to flow. Surrender forsooth! And to the Nana Sahib, the insatiable Tiger of Cawnpore, whose name, and name of all his race, will descend to posterity covered with infamy, and who will be held up to execration and scorn until time shall be no more!
CHAPTER XXV. THE LAST GRAND STRUGGLE.
That call to surrender was answered in a manner that literally paralysed the pursuing sixty.
Forth from the Englishmen’s boat a little party of officers and men went. They were exhausted, famishing, sick, and wounded, but they would not wait to be attacked by such a demoniacal crew. Wading up to their knees in the water that covered the sand-bank, and all armed to the teeth, they made for the other boat, and fell upon the natives with such fury that not half-a-dozen escaped to tell the tale; and even those few only saved their lives by plunging into the deep water, and swimming ashore.
It was a glorious victory, but the last for the hero-martyrs of Cawnpore.