Barclay of the Guides. Herbert Strang

EPILOGUE

       GLOSSARY

       THE BOY'S NEW LIBRARY

       By Herbert Strang

       By Major Charles Gilson

       By Captain G. B. McKean, V.C.

       By Joseph Bowes

       By G. A. Henty

       By Desmond Coke

       By Richard Bird

       By Hylton Cleaver

       By Col. J. P. Groves

       By Henry Frith

       By Gordon Stables

       By W. H. G. Kingston

       By G. Manville Fenn

       By Edwin Hodder

       By T. Baines Reed

       By Harry Collingwood

       By J. F. Cobb

       By T. S. Millington

       By W. M. Thayer

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      The great Mutiny embraced so wide an area, in which momentous events happened almost simultaneously in places far apart, that it seemed advisable to confine the historical background of this story to the siege of Delhi, the city which was the heart of the rebellion. In regard to the historical persons introduced, care has been taken to adhere as closely as possible to facts; and, where the romancer's licence must needs put words into their mouths, to conform to probability and their known characters. If the boys who read these pages should care to know more of the great men of whom they get glimpses, they will find a store of good things in Lumsden of the Guides, by Sir Peter Lumsden and George R. Elsmie; the Memoirs of Sir Henry Daly, by Major H. Daly; A Leader of Light Horse (Hodson), and the Life of John Nicholson, both by Lieut.-Colonel Trotter. The history of the Mutiny, as related in the pages of Kaye and Malleson, will never lose its fascination.

      Herbert Strang

CHAPTER THE FIRST

       Table of Contents

The Raid

       Table of Contents

      Ahmed, son of Rahmut Khan, chief of the village of Shagpur, was making his lonely way through the hills some three miles above his home. He could see the walled village perched on a little tract of grassy land just where the base of the hills met the sandy plain. It was two thousand feet or more below him, and he could almost count the flat-topped houses clustered beyond his father's tower, which, though actually it rose to some height above them, dominating them, and affording an outlook over miles and miles of the plain, yet appeared to Ahmed, at his present altitude, merely a patch in the general level.

      Between him and the village lay three miles of grey rugged hill country, scarred with watercourses, and almost void of vegetation. A mile away, indeed, there was a long stretch of woodland, lying like a great green smudge upon the monotony of grey. It was a patch of irregular shape, narrowing here, broadening there, filling a valley which bent round towards the village. Ahmed was accustomed to shoot there occasionally, but he preferred the more exciting and more dangerous sport of hunting on the hills, where he might stalk his quarry from crag to crag, leaping ravines, swarming up abrupt and precipitous cliffs, always in peril of a fall that might break his limbs even if it did not crash the life out of him. For Ahmed was of a daring disposition, fearless, undauntable, yet possessed of a certain coolness of judgment by which he had hitherto brought himself unscathed through sixteen years of adventurous boyhood.

      He was a tall, slim, lissom fellow, with very black hair and a swarthy skin, which set off the spotless white of his turban. He wore the loose frock and baggy trousers of the country. Yet one observing him would have marked certain differences between his features and those of the Pathans among whom he dwelt. His nose was arched, but it was thinner than was usual among his countrymen. His lips were not so thick as theirs, nor was his mouth so large, and his eyes, instead of coal-black, were of a curious steely-grey. And any one who saw him bathing with the lads of his village (itself a strange pastime, for the hill-men have no great partiality for water) would have been struck by the paleness of his skin where it was protected from the sun and the weather. The observer's conclusion would probably have been that Ahmed was a Pathan of a particularly refined type, and in all likelihood an offshoot of some noble family which time's vicissitudes had reduced.

      Ahmed stood for a few moments looking down at Shagpur, then turned to pursue his way. He had a fowling-piece slung at his back; his intention was to ascend the hills for perhaps another thousand feet, to a spot where he would probably come upon a small herd of black-buck. But he had not mounted far from the place at which he had paused when he halted again, and, putting his left hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun's rays, gazed steadily in a direction away from the village. Below him the plain stretched for many miles, bare and desolate, though when the rains came by and by it would be clothed with verdure. Scarcely a tree broke its level, and so parched was it now that no beast could have found sustenance there. But far away Ahmed's keen eye had descried what appeared to be a speck upon the horizon, and he watched it intently.

      There was nothing unusual in the sight itself. Many a time he had seen just such a speck in the sky, watched it grow in breadth and height, until it stretched across the plain like an immense wall, thirty miles long, a thousand feet high. He had seen it approach like a monstrous phantom, driving before it, as it were, circling flights of kites and vultures, enveloping the bases of the hills, shutting out the sun with yellow scudding clouds. But such a dust-storm ordinarily swept over the plain southwards: Ahmed had never seen one approach from the west; and after a long and steady gaze at the speck, which grew slowly in size, he suddenly dropped his hand, uttered an exclamation in the Pashtu tongue, and turning his back began to retrace his course, at a speed vastly greater than that at which he had formerly been moving, towards