“Quick, for your lives, girls! some of them
are not fifty yards off! To the bushes!
Come, Saba!”
“Saba do more good here,” the old nurse
said, and seated herself quietly in the veranda.
It was but twenty yards to the bushes they had marked
as the place of concealment; and as they entered and
crouched down there came the sound of hurrying feet,
and a band of Sepoys, led by one of the jemadars, or
native officers, rushed up to the veranda from the
back.
“Now,” the jemadar shouted, “search
the house; kill the boys, but keep the white women;
they are too pretty to hurt.”
Two minutes’ search—in which furniture
was upset, curtains pulled down, and chests ransacked—and
a shout of rage proclaimed that the house was empty.
The jemadar shouted to his men: “Search
the compound; they can’t be far off; some of
you run out to the plain; they can’t have got
a hundred yards away; besides, our guards out there
will catch them.”
The old nurse rose to her feet just as the Sepoys
were rushing out on the search.
“It is of no use searching,” she said;
“they have been gone an hour.”
“Gone an hour!” shouted the enraged jemadar;
“who told them of the attack?”
“I told them,” Saba said steadily; “Saba
was true to her salt.”
There was a yell of rage on the part of the mutineers,
and half a dozen bayonets darted into the faithful
old servant’s body, and without a word she fell
dead on the veranda, a victim to her noble fidelity
to the children she had nursed.
“Now,” the jemadar said, “strip
the place; carry everything off; it is all to be divided
to-morrow, and then we will have a blaze.”
Five minutes sufficed to carry off all the portable
articles from the bungalow; the furniture, as useless
to the Sepoys, was left, but everything else was soon
cleared away, and then the house was lit in half a
dozen places. The fire ran quickly up the muslin
curtains, caught the dry reeds of the tatties, ran
up the bamboos which formed the top of the veranda,
and in five minutes the house was a sheet of flame.
THE FLIGHT.
The young Warreners and their cousin, hurrying on,
soon gained the thick bush toward which they were
directing their steps. As they cowered down in
its shelter the girls pulled their shawls over their
heads, and with their hands to their ears to keep
out the noise of the awful din around them, they awaited,
in shuddering horror, their fate. The boys sat,
revolver in hand, determined to sell their lives dearly.
Ned translated the jemadar’s speech, and at
his order to search the compound both felt that all
was over, and, with a grasp of each other’s
hand, prepared to sally forth and die. Then came
Saba’s act of noble self-sacrifice, and the boys
had difficulty in restraining themselves from rushing
out to avenge her.
