was dead, went home hoping that Krishna had nothing more against
them; they had done what they could.

As to Sunni he told his grief to Tooni because it comforted him,
and went into mourning for nine days in defiance of public opinion,
because he owed it to the memory of a countryman. He began, too,
to take long restless rambles beyond the gates, and once he asked
Tooni if she knew the road to Calcutta.

'It is fifty thousand miles,' said Tooni, who had an imagination;
'and the woods are full of tigers.'

CHAPTER VIII

The gates of Lalpore were shut, and all about her walls the yellow
sandy plains stretched silent and empty. There did not seem to be
so much as a pariah dog outside. Some pipal-trees looked over the
walls, and a couple of very antiquated cannon looked through them,
but nothing stirred. It made a splendid picture at broad noon, the
blue sky and the old red-stone city on her little hill, holding up
her minarets and the white marble bubbles of her temples, and then
the yellow sand drifting up; but one could not look at it long.
Colonel Starr, from the door of his tent, half a mile away, had
looked at it pretty steadily for two hours, so steadily that his
eyes, red and smarting with the dust of a two hundred mile ride,
watered copiously, and made him several degrees more uncomfortable
than he had been before.

I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in
the Colonel's mind, it was so full of other considerations. He
thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their
colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the arsenal than
upon the curves of the temples. Because, in the Colonel's opinion,
it had come to look very like fighting. In the opinion of little
Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with
yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be 'bagging' the
Maharajah's artillery by now. Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling
for the fray. So were the men, most of them. They wanted a change
of diet. Thomas Jones, sergeant, entirely expressed the sentiments
of his company when he said that somebody ort to pay up for this
blessed march, they 'adn't wore the skins off their 'eels fer two
'undred mile to admire the bloomin' scenery. Besides, for Thomas
Jones's part, he was tired of living on this yere bloomin' tinned
rock, he wanted a bit of fresh roast kid and a Lalpore curry.

Colonel Starr had been sent to 'arrange,' if po