vereign, and a
hundred rupees are worth 6 pounds 13s. 4d.

CHAPTER 13

Thugs and Poisoners.

Lieutenant Brown had come on to Damoh chiefly with a view to
investigate a case of murder, which had taken place at the village of
Sujaina, about ten miles from Damoh, on the road to Hatta.[1] A gang
of two hundred Thugs were encamped in the grove at Hindoria in the
cold season of 1814, when, early in the morning, seven men well armed
with swords and matchlocks passed them, bearing treasure from the
bank of Moti Kochia at Jubbulpore to their correspondents at
Banda,[2] to the value of four thousand five hundred rupees.[3] The
value of their burden was immediately perceived by these _keen-eyed_
sportsmen, and Kosari, Drigpal, and Faringia, three of the leaders,
with forty of their fleetest and stoutest followers, were immediately
selected for the pursuit. They followed seven miles unperceived; and,
coming up with the treasure-bearers in a watercourse half a mile from
the village of Sujaina, they rushed in upon them and put them all to
death with their swords.[4] While they were doing so a tanner from
Sujaina approached with his buffalo, and to prevent him giving the
alarm they put him to death also, and made off with the treasure,
leaving the bodies unburied. A heavy shower of rain fell, and none of
the village people came to the place till the next morning early;
when some females, passing it on their way to Hatta, saw the bodies,
and returning to Sujaina, reported the circumstance to their friends.
The whole village thereupon flocked to the spot, and the body of the
tanner was burned by his relations with the usual ceremonies, while
all the rest were left to be eaten by jackals, dogs and vultures, who
make short work of such things in India.[5]

We had occasion to examine a very respectable old gentleman at Damoh
upon the case, Gobind Das, a revenue officer under the former
Government,[6] and now about seventy years of age. He told us that he
had no knowledge whatever of the murder of the eight men at Sujaina;
but he well remembered another which took place seven years before
the time we mentioned at Abhana, a stage or two back, on the road to
Jubbulpore. Seventeen treasure-bearers lodged in the grove near that
town on their way from Jubbulpore to Sagar. At night they were set
upon by a large gang of Thugs, and sixteen of them strangled; but the
seventeenth laid hold of the noose before it could be brought to bear