'Yes,' says Hosain Khan, 'you stabbed him yourself, like a coward as you are, when he lay asleep by his bullocks.'
'And if I did,' cries his opponent, 'did not your father knock out my cousin's brains with a lathee[2] and get sent over the Kala Panee[3] for his pains?'
The controversy waxed ardent; the combatants' voices rose shrill and high; they tossed their black locks and waved their arms, and poured out long streams of passionate family history, long-cherished feuds—deep, never-to-be-forgotten wrongs—interminable complications as to lands and wells, women and bullocks; and Blunt, who understood nothing but that they had travelled a long way from the Rumble Chunder Grant, sat by in mute and wrathful despair, and began to perceive that the administration of justice to folks so excitable and unveracious as these was no such easy matter as he had once imagined.
Amid all the chaff, however, Blunt had, he thought, got hold of one piece of solid fact: either the Sunnud was a forgery or it was not; and if a forgery, then he resolved to make an example, prosecute Uzuf Ali for his fraud, and turn him summarily out of his pretended rights. A forgery no doubt it was, for the paper bore the British watermark, and you could see the places where the gunpowder had been smeared in hopes of giving it an antiquated look. And so the question was decided, and the order made out, and poor Uzuf Ali, in vain protesting that it was a device of the enemy, left the Commissioner's presence a ruined man.
Ruined men, however, are dangerous things at all times, and especially with an excitable and easily frightened people, who see in their neighbours' fall only an anticipation of their own. The Bazaar was presently in a tumult: angry clusters of talkers gathered in circles round the grain-shops or at the village well, or under the great banyan-tree which spread a wide shade over one end of the street, and discussed past grievances and future disaster. Meanwhile Blunt, not with so light a heart or seeing his way as clearly as usual, had moved his head-quarters a dozen miles away, and begun a new series of investigations with a new set of Hosain Khans and Uzuf Alis, and with precisely similar success.
Before the month was over Fotheringam's words had come true. The Eusuf Khayls, a turbulent tribe of frontier freebooters, were up. A police outpost had been attacked in force one night, and its occupants had made a bad retreat, leaving two of their number on the field. The marauders had ridden through twenty miles of British territory, burning villages, destroying crops, driving away bullocks to their fastnesses in the hills. Blunt, as he came, escorted by a strong detachment, into Dustypore, met the Horse Artillery rattling out towards the disturbed region; and a telegram despatched to Elysium informed Sutton that he was to head a flying column into the enemies' country and that he must be with his regiment without an instant's delay.