“I’m all right—don’t stay,” Dicky urged, as he began to understand the sacrifice of the student in remaining with him instead of following the mob.
“Nagarjuna did not say for one hour, or for half of one day, but for the full day,” Lala Relu Ram declared, “and who knows but that I too might have disobeyed the orders of Mahatma-ji and become violent?”
Dicky hadn’t much of a grin left, but such as it was, he was free to let it work under the folds of gauze. He sent the student below on one pretext after another, knowing that the young man was exhausting himself from strain to hear all that had happened.
“It is more terrible than we supposed,” the student reported, as the long day ended. “Enraged by their dead and wounded, and being prevented from carrying their request to the Deputy Commissioner, my people have burned buildings, bank buildings—the National, the Chartered, the Alliance banks——”
“That’s hitting them where they live,” said Mr. Cobden, impelled to Americanisms as never before.
“Sir?” said Lala Relu Ram, bending forward on the scent of the idiom.
“A Government bank is an English nerve center, Lala Ram,” Dicky said.
The student was thoughtful, and then resumed: “It is with sorrow that I have to confess that my people have forgotten themselves in the case of Mr. Stewart and Mr. Scott of the National Bank and Mr. Thomason of the Alliance Bank——”
“Hurt?” said Dicky.
“Dead,” said the student, with a dramatic pause. “And that is not all. Miss Sherwood was most brutally assaulted, and outside the city a railway guard named Robinson, and a havildar in charge of the Electric, named Rowlands, were beaten to death where they live, and the station goods yard burnt——”