“He rides!” breathed Ghulam Rasul in an ecstasy, and “He rides!” cried the sowar nearest him, catching up the words from his lips. “He rides!” went from man to man, until the defenders of the towers looked at one another with glistening eyes, and even the unsympathetic Sikhs, who held themselves loftily aloof from the contemptible local superstitions of their Khemi comrades, repeated, with something of enthusiasm, “He rides!” “He rides; all is well,” said Ismail Bakhsh, puffing out his chest with pride, in his temporary guardroom on the clubhouse verandah. “Sinjāj Kīlin Sahib is watching over his house and over his children. The power of the Sarkar stands firm.”
“HE RIDES”
All unconscious of the moral reinforcement which was doubling the strength of the garrison, Mabel and Flora sat disconsolately over the charcoal brazier in Mrs Hardy’s room, listening for the sounds of the attack, which they expected to hear each moment. Mrs Hardy’s vigorous rebuke had nerved them both to put a brave face on matters, and for some time they vied with one another in discovering reasons for refusing to credit the report of the fugitive, and deciding that all might yet be well. But as time went on, and there was no sign of the triumphant return of Colonel Graham and his force, their valiant efforts at cheerfulness flagged perceptibly. Mrs Hardy, running across to say that Georgia was doing pretty well, advised them to lie down and try to sleep, but they scouted the idea with indignation, and still sat looking gloomily into the glowing embers and listening to the night wind, which wailed round the crazy old buildings in a peculiarly mournful manner.
“Doesn’t it seem absurdly incongruous,” said Mabel at last, in a low voice, “that you and I—two fin de siècle High School girls, who have taken up all the modern fads just like other people—should be sitting here, expecting every moment that a band of savages will break in and kill us—with swords? It feels so unnatural—so horribly out of drawing.”
“How can you talk such nonsense?” snapped Flora, upon whose nerves the strain of suspense was telling severely. “I never heard that a High School career protected people against a violent death. Do you think it felt natural to the women in the Mutiny to be killed—or the French Revolution, or any time like that?”
“I don’t know. It really seems as if they must have been more accustomed to horrors in those days. Just imagine, Flora, the little paragraph there will be in the South Central Magazine: ‘We regret to record the death of Miss Mabel North, O.S.C., who was murdered in the late rising on the Indian frontier. Miss Flora Graham, a distinguished student of St Scipio’s College, St Margarets, N.B., is believed to have perished on the same sad occasion.’ Your school paper will have just the same sort of thing in it, and the two editors will send each other complimentary copies, and acknowledge the courtesy in the next number. It will all be about you and me—and we shall be dead.”
“Of course we shall; you said that before. But I don’t see what good it does to die many times before our deaths.”
“How horrid of you to call me a coward!” said Mabel pensively.
“I don’t call you anything of the sort. I think you must be fearfully brave to look at things in this detached, artistic kind of way, but what’s the good of it? Death must come when it will come, but naturally no one could be expected to look forward with pleasure to the mere fact of dying. Unless, of course”—Flora’s blue eyes shone as she turned suddenly from the general to the particular—“my dying would save papa or Fred. Then I should be glad to die.”