Without the slightest sign of sympathy or feeling the curt answer came—
“Your man was shot down amongst the first that fell.”
Without a word she went away. None of the women had any sympathy to waste upon a Naga woman, even though her husband had been a constable and she had left her home and people to live with him. No one attempted to detain her, or said a kind word as she passed.
Following her out, I asked her why she went away, and warned her not to go. Her child would probably be killed by the first Angamis that she met, because her husband was well known.
“They will not harm the child. I must go and find my husband,” she replied, and passed on into the darkness and the rain. The chance of finding him alive urged her to hurry on. If he had fallen in the first attack, she knew the place, and made her way straight for it. But perhaps he was not killed. He might have been one of those who had rolled down the steep khud from the narrow pathway where they fell, and she would find him wounded, but safely hidden, at the bottom of the khud. If he was dead, she might yet be in time to save his head and bury him, and hide him from the cruel hands of her savage countrymen.
The Nagas met her on her way and jeered at her, asking her where her Sepoy husband was; but still they let her pass, and on she went. Who can describe the horrors of that journey!
The darkness hid many a ghastly sight, but daybreak found her near the scene of her disaster. Murdered men lay across her path headless, with gaping wounds; shrieks of despair rang in her ears from many a poor wounded wretch who had escaped in the night only to fall into the hands of his enemies in the morning; and yells of fiendish triumph went up as each new victim was discovered and despatched.
Esmé.