The siege train was toiling slowly across the Punjab, but the setting in of the monsoon rendered the transit of heavy cannon a laborious task.
On the 24th of August an officer rode in from the town of Baghput, twenty-five miles to the north, to report that the train was parked there for the night.
“What sort of escort accompanies it?” asked Nicholson, when the news reached him.
“Almost exclusively natives and few in numbers at that,” he was told.
An hour later a native spy from Delhi came to the camp.
“The mutineers are mustering for a big march,” he said. “They are providing guns, litters, and commissariat camels, and the story goes that they mean to fight the Feringhis at Bahadurgarh.”
The place named was a large village, ten miles northwest of the ridge, and Nicholson guessed instantly that the sepoys had planned the daring coup of cutting off the siege train. With him, to hear was to act. He formed a column of two thousand men and a battery of field artillery and left the camp at dawn on the 25th. If a forced march could accomplish it, he meant not only to frustrate the enemy’s design but inflict a serious defeat on them.
Malcolm went with him and never had he taken part in a harder day’s work. The road was a bullock track, a swamp of mud amid the larger swamp of the ploughed land and jungle. Horses and men floundered through it as best they might. The guns often sank almost to the trunnions; many a time the infantry had to help elephants and bullocks to haul them out.
In seven hours the column only marched nine miles, and then came the disheartening news that the spy’s information was wrong. The rebels had, indeed, sent out a strong force, but they were at Nujufgarh, miles away to the right.
Officers and men ate a slight meal, growled a bit, and swung off in the new direction. At four o’clock in the afternoon they found the sepoy army drawn up behind a canal, with its right protected by another canal, and the center and left posted in fortified villages. Evidently, too, a stout serai, or inn, a square building surrounding a quadrangle set apart for the lodgment of camels and merchandise was regarded as a stronghold. Here were placed six guns and the walls were loopholed for musketry.