Of course you know all
about it, gentlemen -- a deal more than I do, very like, since
reading is not in my line. I only know what I saw with my own
eyes. Our plantation was at a place called Muttra, near the
border of the Nonhwest Provinces. Night after night the whole
sky was alight with the burning bungalows, and day after day we
had small companies of Europeans passing through our estate
with their wives and children, on their way to Agra, where were
the nearest troops. Mr. Abel White was an obstinate man. He
had it in his head that the affair had been exaggerated, and that it
would blow over as suddenly as it had sprung up. There he sat
on his veranda, drinking whisky-pegs and smoking cheroots,
while the country was in a blaze about him. Of course we stuck
by him, I and Dawson, who, with his wife. used to do the
book-work and the managing. Well, one fine day the crash
came. I had been away on a distant plantation and was riding
slowly home in the evening, when my eye fell upon something
all huddled together at the bottom of a steep nullah. I rode down
to see what it was, and the cold struck through my heart when I
found it was Dawson's wife, all cut into ribbons, and half eaten
by jackals and native dogs. A little further up the road Dawson
himself was lying on his face, quite dead, with an empty re-
volver in his hand, and four sepoys lying across each other in
front of him.
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