Some little time after this incident I saw a small group of fugitives far away on our left, making for a walled village, and it occurred to me to try a long shot at them with my Lancaster rifle, which was always carried by my orderly on a belt slung over his shoulder; so I turned round and asked for it, but the orderly was not to be seen, and some of the other men said:--"Don't you know, Sahib, that your orderly has been killed?" "Killed!" I exclaimed. "When? Has he not been following me all along?" Then, for the first time, I learned that the faithful fellow, who must have been close at my heels when I charged the sepoy, but of whose presence in my excitement I had been totally oblivious, had been hit in the chest by the bullet which I had so narrowly escaped and had been seen to fall. I could not then return to the fatal spot, but I sent a couple of men back at once to find the poor fellow, and, if he should be still alive, to get a doolie and carry him to the hospital tent in camp.
For several miles we kept up the pursuit till we had apparently exhausted the lead--to use a miner's term--on which we had struck. We were about to give up the chase, when, from the far side of a ravine, a solitary fugitive fired his musket at a group of our officers. He must have aimed at the one who, from his full brown beard and apparent age, seemed to him the most important and most likely to be the commander. That shot cost us the life of our brave Commanding Officer. The gallant Captain Wale fell, mortally wounded by two slugs, one of which passed through his beard into his throat, the other into his mouth. He was instantly avenged, for, as the rebel sepoy turned to fly, he also fell dead, hit in the spine by a bullet from the revolver of Captain Chichester.
In a few minutes, to the deep grief of his officers and men, by whom he was loved as few Commanding Officers are ever loved, poor Wale breathed his last. A doolie was sent for from the rear, his body placed in it and reverently carried back to camp. Sick at heart, I now sought the place where my unfortunate orderly had met his fate. My worst fears were realized. He was dead. His body had not been disturbed by the men whom I had sent to find him, and he was lying on his back, the rifle underneath him, with a hole through the leather sling just where it crossed over the heart. Close by lay the corpse of the sepoy.