These were the Bad Men—­worse than Goblins—­and it needed all Wee Willie Winkie’s training to prevent him from bursting into tears.  But he felt that to cry before a native, excepting only his mother’s ayah, would be an infamy greater than any mutiny.  Moreover, he, as future Colonel of the 195th, had that grim regiment at his back.

“Are you going to carry us away?” said Wee Willie Winkie, very blanched and uncomfortable.

“Yes, my little Sahib Bahadur,” said the tallest of the men, “and eat you afterwards.”

“That is child’s talk,” said Wee Willie Winkie.  “Men do not eat men.”

A yell of laughter interrupted him, but he went on firmly—­“And if you do carry us away, I tell you that all my regiment will come up in a day and kill you all without leaving one.  Who will take my message to the Colonel Sahib?”

Speech in any vernacular—­and Wee Willie Winkie had a colloquial acquaintance with three—­was easy to the boy who could not yet manage his “r’s” and “th’s” aright.

Another man joined the conference, crying, “O foolish men!  What this babe says is true.  He is the heart’s heart of those white troops.  For the sake of peace let them go both, for if he be taken, the regiment will break loose and gut the valley.  Our villages are in the valley, and we shall not escape.  That regiment are devils.  They broke Khoda Yar’s breastbone with kicks when he tried to take the rifles; and if we touch this child they will fire and rape and plunder for a month till nothing remains.  Better to send a man back to take the message and get a reward.  I say that this child is their God, and that they will spare none of us, nor our women, if we harm him.”

It was Din Mahommed, the dismissed groom of the Colonel, who made the diversion, and an angry and heated discussion followed.  Wee Willie Winkie, standing over Miss Allardyce, waited the upshot.  Surely his “wegiment,” his own “wegiment,” would not desert him if they knew of his extremity.

The riderless pony brought the news to the 195th, though there had been consternation in the Colonel’s household for an hour before.  The little beast came in through the parade-ground in front of the main barracks, where the men were settling down to play Spoil-five till the afternoon.  Devlin, the Color-Sergeant of E Company, glanced at the empty saddle and tumbled through the barrack-rooms, kicking up each Room Corporal as he passed.  “Up, ye beggars!  There’s something happened to the Colonel’s son,” he shouted.

“He couldn’t fall off!  S’help me, ’e couldn’t fall off,” blubbered a drummer-boy.  “Go an’ hunt acrost the river.  He’s over there if he’s anywhere, an’ maybe those Pathans have got ’im.  For the love o’ Gawd don’t look for ’im in the nullahs!  Let’s go over the river.”

“There’s sense in Mott yet,” said Devlin.  “E Company, double out to the river—­sharp!”

So E Company, in its shirt-sleeves mainly, doubled for the dear life, and in the rear toiled the perspiring Sergeant, adjuring it to double yet faster.  The cantonment was alive with the men of the 195th hunting for Wee Willie Winkie, and the Colonel finally overtook E Company, far too exhausted to swear, struggling in the pebbles of the river-bed.