of blackness, punctured by the
low-hung, steel-white stars, men neither knew nor cared whose child had
died. Life and hell-hot torture and indifference--all three were one.

There was no moon, nothing to make the inferno visible, except that here
and there an oil lamp on some housetop glowed like a blood-spot against
the blackness. It was a sensation, rather than sight or sound, that
betrayed the neighborhood of thousands upon thousands of human beings,
sprawling, writhing, twisting upon the roofs, in restless suffering.

There was no pity in the dry, black vault of heaven, nor in the bone-dry
earth, nor in the hearts of men, during that hot weather of '57. Men
waited for the threatened wrath to come and writhed and held their
tongues. And while they waited in sullen Asiatic patience, through
the restless silence and the smell--the suffocating, spice-fed,
filth-begotten smell of India--there ran an undercurrent of even deeper
mystery than India had ever known.

Priest-ridden Hanadra, that had seen the downfall of a hundred kings,
watched through heat-wearied eyes for another whelming the blood-soaked,
sudden flood that was to burst the dam of servitude and rid India of her
latest horde of conquerors. But eight hundred yards from where her high
brick walls lifted their age-scars in the stifling reek, gun-chains
jingled in a courtyard, and, sharp-clicking on age-old flagstones, rose
the ring of horses' feet.

Section Number One of a troop of Bengal Horse Artillery was waiting
under arms. Sabered and grim and ready stood fifty of the finest men
that England could produce, each man at his horse's head; and blacker
even than the night loomed the long twelve-pounders, in tow behind their
limbers. Sometimes a trace-chain jingled as a wheel-horse twitched his
flank; and sometimes a man spoke in a low voice, or a horse stamped
on the pavement; but they seemed like black graven images of war-gods,
half-smothered in the reeking darkness. And above them, from a window
that overlooked the courtyard, shone a solitary lamp that glistened here
and there upon the sleek black guns and flickered on the saber-hilts,
and deepened the already dead-black atmosphere of mystery.

From the room above, where the lamp shone behind gauze curtains came the
sound of voices; and in the deepest, death-darkest shadow of the door
below there stood a man on guard whose fingers clutched his sword-hilt
and whose breath came heavily. He stood motionless