"'Not yet are you safe,' said he, and from underneath his garments he produced a bundle. 'Put on this.' I unfolded it, and found a garment similar to his own, with cloth for a turban.
"In a few moments I had become a native. The bronze of my face, with added dust and blood, made my complexion dark as his own. In a few words I told him I was Captain Gascoyne of the 53rd.
"'Then,' said he, quickly, 'you can speak as one of us, and none can know any difference.' From that moment, except on three occasions, I have spoken no English until now.
"Proceeding with infinite caution, once or twice scanned by straggling mutineers, all of whom were more or less under the influence of bhang, we at length reached his house, a secluded one by the river. There for some days I lay in a stupor of sleep, yet with the one idea of vengeance running like a dark thread through my slumbers, in which I saw again my poor girl's fair hair clotted with blood, and felt it clinging round my neck and face.
"When my weary limbs and brain were rested, I was able to talk to Nanukchund, my preserver. He told me much that of course you know—of the outbreak, of the excesses of the mutineers, which he deplored, for he knew how the reckoning would be, and that he was the friend of the Sahibs, and after we had been shot down, came to see if life remained in any of us.
"He was a far-sighted man, and he knew that the yoke these fiends were trying to throw off would be only the more strongly riveted round their necks, and he knew that the English raj was more wise, more just and merciful, than the divided tyrannies of their own Princes. One day he came to the room where I lay, and, with tears running down his face, told me with terror, lest I should rise up and slay him because of his kinship with such demons, of the massacre of the women and children by the order of the bastard Raja of Bithoor, Nana Sahib—how the Sepoys, commanded to shoot them, thrust their guns through the windows, and fired a volley over their heads, and then, sickened of the horror, refused to have anything more to do with it; and no one at first could be found to carry out the brute's orders, until at last Survur Khan, the butcher—the same who had killed my little Madge—volunteered for the murderous job. Then another monster was found, and with swords they went into the slaughter pen, Survur coming out to replace one sword he had broken, by another."
"THE COLONEL CRIED OUT, 'FOR GOD'S SAKE, STOP.'"
At this point of Gascoyne's narrative, so the Captain told me, the Colonel cried out, "For God's sake, stop," and got up and went out of the tent, and Gascoyne said—
"Yes, I remember; he lost a wife and a little girl there."