'Anything,' said the colonel, 'is better than bitter beer that has been boiling on the dusty road between Peshawur and Jellalabad, till the cask hoops grow hot in the sun.'
So he took a huge beaker of brandy pawnee, as he reclined in the cane easy-chair in his well tattied bungalow, with punkah wallahs crouching in the verandah outside, and smoked his hookah, for he preferred such a residence to a double-poled tent or a tumble-down brick house in that city of earthquakes, till the troops marched.
'I knew your uncle, Wellwood, thoroughly,' said the colonel to Colville. 'He and I were great chums, and I once saw him do a plucky thing—a very plucky thing, by Jove!—when we were giving a fellow a tight flogging under fire.'
'A flogging under fire—that was remarkable, surely?'
'Not so in those days; we were never squeamish about anything then.'
'And this plucky thing?' said Redhaven, the hussar.
'Convinced me that Wellwood was pretty reckless of life. He had been soured by some disappointment in love, we heard—the idea of such a thing!'
And, while old Splatterdash laughed a little contemptuously at the thought of a tender passion, Colville, remembering the secret episode of Mrs. Deroubigne's life, listened with some interest.
'It came about in this way, you see,' said the colonel, after taking a long pull at his hookah. 'After we advanced upon Jhansi under Sir Hugh Rose to crush the rebellious Sepoys who held the place (which was a town and fortress of the Mahrattas of old), we bombarded it heavily for four days, but not without resistance, for the shattered remains of the Gwalior contingent, augmented to twenty-five thousand bayonets and sabres, and eighteen pieces of cannon from Kalpee, came marching along the right bank of the Jumna, hoping to raise the siege, d—n them!
'In that, however, the Pandies were disappointed. During the bombardment, when we were pitching shot and shell into each other, a great thirteen-inch bomb from an old mortar happened to fall close by where the soldier of a European regiment was tied up to "the halberts," as we still called the triangles, to receive a hundred and fifty lashes for insubordination when mad with drink and heat. The sudden appearance of this great missile, with its fuse burning and hissing, caused such confusion and consternation that the companies, formed in hollow square, fell back on all sides, even breaking their ranks, for none could composedly await such an explosion under their noses.