He stood up stiffly to shake hands with each of his guests. “Good night, ma’am; good night, good night! I wish you would take order with this brother of yours. He goes about looking for personal combats, which I tell him ain’t becoming in a staff officer. After having his horse killed under him in the bed of the watercourse, what does he do but seek out and slay one of the principal chiefs of the enemy, in the midst of his followers? There’s a fire-eater for you—eh?”
“Brian!” Eveleen’s tone was poignant, “d’ye tell me Cromaboo is killed? I saw you were riding Bawn, but I thought——”
“Will you listen to her? She’d rather her own and only brother was killed, than his horse!” cried Brian reproachfully.
“Come along, my dear. We are taking up the General’s time,” said Richard, and she obeyed reluctantly. It was the kind of evening on which it seems impossible to go to bed as if nothing had happened.
Colonel Bayard was in camp in the morning—very well pleased with himself in the honest conviction that his expedition had contributed materially to the General’s success. His force, on the other hand, were so disgusted that their comrades found it advisable not to mention the battle to them. To spend a whole day in trying to set fire to a forest which would not burn, and from which the enemy had silently vanished in the night, while eight miles away a life-and-death struggle was going forward—as the booming of the guns showed,—this was enough to make any troops angry. A little ray of hope had brightened their path as they approached the camp towards midnight, for an alarm of some sort had led to heavy firing; but if it was really due to an attack by the enemy—and not to a panic among the excluded camp-followers, who suffered heavily when they tried to find refuge in the square—it was quickly beaten off. The General, wrapped in his cloak, slept through it all, and even through Colonel Bayard’s efforts to wake him and report, but in the morning he was as fresh and cheerful as a youngster of twenty. He had already put things in motion for the day when he met his staff at breakfast in the shivering dawn, and at that uncomfortable hour they found his good humour little short of irritating. But knowing him, they understood it when they realised the stake for which he was playing.
“In an hour from now we should receive the reply of the Khans.” He dropped the remark into the group round the table like a bomb.
“Have you summoned the city already, General?” asked Colonel Bayard, laughing.
“I have. Keeling is gone off with a flag of truce, and the ten best-mounted men he could pick from his regiment, so as to produce a good impression.”
“And what terms do you offer the Khans, if I may ask?”
“Terms, sir?” explosively. “Their lives!”