He was a man above fifty years of age, with a stern face of a decidedly Jewish type, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones, dark and restless eyes, having beetling brows tufted with grizzly hair, and a long grey beard that descended to his shawl-girdle.
But his appearance only added to the rancorous fury of the people and the mutineers. Rushing on him with rage, Mahmoud Shah tore him from his saddle; he was wounded by a bayonet, severely stoned, and borne away to the palace, covered with blood and in a dying condition.
Two other officers of high rank—one a sirdir or general—also strove to quell the disturbance, but were fired on and compelled to seek safety in flight.
That portion of the Bala Hissar assigned as a Residency was far too large for the little garrison that had then to defend it, and it was now surrounded on its four sides by that ferocious multitude of armed men bent on slaughter and cruelty, led on by an equally frantic band of moollahs.
'They are flinging lighted brands on the roof from the arsenal,' cried some one, and overhead the roar of flames was soon heard as the open upper storey we have described became sheeted with fire.
'If that is the case, a little time will see us all gone to the bow-wows!' cried Robert Wodrow, whom danger always seemed to exhilarate and make more reckless.
Despairing of all succour from the false Ameer, and as if eager to die hard, and in doing so to anticipate their doom, the few surviving heroes of the little garrison charged out sword in hand, and plunged—thrusting with the point, and hewing with the edge—into the human sea that filled the court between the Bala Hissar gate, just as night was closing, and there they all perished to a man, save one—perished just as the roof of the Residency came crashing down amid black smoke and crackling flames, thus preserving the bodies of Sir Louis Cavagnari, of Dr. Kelly, and several others from the last insults of a savage enemy.
Aided by the wild confusion, the sudden darkness of the tropical night, and not a little by his disguised visage and native costume, Robert Wodrow achieved a passage into the streets of the city, and from thence, as all thoroughfares save those in the vicinity of the Bala Hissar were deserted, into the open plain near the city, and there he threaded his way without molestation among the apple, citron, and olive groves, the mud forts and garden walls, till he found a plantation of sugar-canes, and then, weary, worn, covered with bruises, famished, and athirst—ready almost to weep—after the past excitement of that terrible day, and the loss of all his friends and comrades—last, not least, Leslie Colville, he flung himself on the ground to recover breath and to think over the situation.
Day was dawning, and tipping with red and gold the summits of the Bala Hissar, when Wodrow awoke to find that he had been asleep for some hours, and now rose, stiff and sore in every limb. The flames of the conflagration had died out, but a black pall of smoke overhung the towers and battlements of the ancient and picturesque palatial fortress, which, with a recklessness of courage for which it is difficult to account, he actually resolved to revisit, as if to see the last—the end of everything.
He had the caution, however, to readjust his disguise, to carefully load his revolver, and by untwisting another cartridge and mixing the powder in a dew-laden leaf, to carefully retouch his face, using the case of his watch as a mirror, and to re-blacken his hands and wrists, before he ventured near the scene of the last night's horrors.