were in the riotous crowd that
pressed along with it. They had taken refuge in the outer bazar,
and Sonny Sahib, sound asleep and well hidden, had taken refuge
with them.

As to Sonny Sahib's mother, she was neither shot in the boats with
the soldiers that believed the written word of the Nana Sahib, nor
stabbed with the women and children who went back to the palace
afterwards. She died quietly in the oxcart before it reached the
ghat, and the pity of it was that Sonny Sahib's father, the
captain, himself in hospital four hundred miles from Cawnpore,
never knew.

There is a marble angel in Cawnpore now, standing in a very quiet
garden, and shut off even from the trees and the flowers by an
enclosing wall. The angel looks always down, down, and such an
awful, pitiful sorrow stands there with her that nobody cares to
try to touch it with words. People only come and look and go
silently away, wondering what time can have for the healing of such
a wound as this. There is an inscription--

SACRED TO THE PERPETUAL MEMORY OF A LARGE COMPANY OF CHRISTIAN
PEOPLE, CHIEFLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WHO NEAR THIS SPOT WERE CRUELLY
MURDERED BY THE FOLLOWERS OF THE REBEL NANA DHUNDU PANT OF BITHUR,
AND CAST, THE DYING WITH THE DEAD, INTO THE WELL BELOW, ON THE XVTH
DAY OF JULY MDCCCLVII.'

And afterward Sonny Sahib's father believed that all he could learn
while he lived about the fate of his wife and his little son was
written there. But he never knew.

CHAPTER II

Tooni and Abdul heard the terrible news of Cawnpore six months
later. They had gone back to their own country, and it was far
from Cawnpore--hundreds and hundreds of miles across a white sandy
desert, grown with prickles and studded with rocks--high up in the
north of Rajputana. In the State of Chita and the town of
Rubbulgurh there was no fighting, because there were no Sahibs.
The English had not yet come to teach the Maharajah how to govern
his estate and spend his revenues. That is to say, there was no
justice to speak of, and a great deal of cholera, and by no means
three meals a day for everybody, or even two. But nobody was
discontented with troubles that came from the gods and the
Maharajah, and talk of greased cartridges would not have been
understood. Thinking of this, Abdul often said to Tooni, his wife;
'The service of the sahib is good and profitable, but in old age
peace is better, even though we are compelled to pay many rupees