Gessi that he had received enough
powder from his own base on the Nile to renew the attack on Suleiman.
Within one week of Gordon's arrival not a slave-dealer remained in
Shaka, and when envoys arrived from Suleiman, bearing protestations
that he had never been hostile to the Egyptian Government, he promptly
arrested them and sent them for trial by court-martial. Their guilt as
conspirers against the Khedive was easily proved, and they were shot.
Their fate was fully deserved, but Gordon would have spared their
lives if Suleiman had not himself slain so many hostages and helpless
captives.

Gordon's final operations for the suppression of the slave trade in
Darfour, carried on while Gessi was engaged in his last struggle with
Suleiman, resulted in the release of several thousand slaves, and the
dispersal and disarmament of nearly 500 slave-dealers. In one week he
rescued as many as 500 slaves, and he began to feel, as he said, that
he had at last reached the heart of the evil.

But while these final successes were being achieved, he was recalled
by telegraph to Cairo, where events had reached a crisis, and the days
of Ismail as Khedive were numbered. It may have been the instinct of
despair that led that Prince to appeal again to Gordon, but the
Darfour rebellion was too grave to allow of his departure before it
had been suppressed; and on the 1st July he received a telegram from
the Minister Cherif, calling on him to proclaim throughout the Soudan
Tewfik Pasha as Khedive. The change did not affect him in the least,
he wrote, for not merely had his personal feelings towards Ismail
changed after he threw him over at Cairo, but he had found out the
futility of writing to him on any subject connected with the Soudan,
and with this knowledge had come a feeling of personal indifference.

On his return to Khartoum, he received tidings of the execution of
Suleiman, and also of the death of the Darfourian Sultan, Haroun, so
that he felt justified in assuming that complete tranquillity had
settled down on the scene of war. The subsequent capture and execution
of Abdulgassin proved this view to be well founded, for, with the
exception of Rabi, who escaped to Borgu, he was the last of Zebehr's
chief lieutenants. The shot that killed that brigand, the very man who
shed the child's blood to consecrate the standard, was the last fired
under Gordon's orders in the Soudan. If the slave trade was then not
absolutely dead, it was doom