“By Jove, old fellow, I am glad to see you. I am Malcolm of the 3d Cavalry, and I have brought news from General Havelock.”
The leader of the scouting party, a stalwart subaltern of dragoons, thought that it was a piece of impudence on the part of this “dark” stranger to address him so familiarly.
“I happen to be acquainted with Mr. Malcolm—” he began.
“Not so well as I know him, Saumarez,” said Frank, laughing. He had not counted on his disguise being so complete. But the laugh proved his identity, for there is more distinctive character in a man’s mirth than in any other inflection of the voice.
Saumarez testified to an amazed recognition in the approved manner of a dragoon.
“Either you are Malcolm or I am bewitched,” he cried. Then he looked at Chumru.
“This gentleman, no doubt, is at least a brigadier,” he went on. “But, joking apart, have you really ridden from Allahabad?”
The question showed the lack of information of events farther south that obtained in the Punjab. By this time the sepoys had torn down the telegraph posts and cut the wires in all directions. Even between Cawnpore and Calcutta, whenever they crossed the Grand Trunk Road they destroyed the telegraph. As one of them said, looking up at a damaged pole which was about to serve as his gallows:
“Ah, you are able to hang me now because that cursed wire strangled all of us in our sleep.”
His metaphor was correct enough. There is no telling what might have been the course of history in India if the sepoys had stopped telegraphic communication from the North to Calcutta early in May.