Yet a few weeks, and Dhoondoo Punth, stripped of even these relics of his former affluence and grandeur, escaped across the Nepaulese marches to a life of suspense, and toil, and privation amidst the Himalayan solitudes. The end of that man we know not, and may never know. Perchance, as they hover over some wild ravine or wind-swept peak, the eagles wonder at the great ruby which sparkles amidst the rags of a vagrant who perished amidst the snows of a past December. Perchance another generation will hear, not without a qualm of involuntary awe and pity, that the world-noted malefactor is at last to expiate misdeeds already classical. He may have eluded human justice. His hemp may be still to sow. But his place in history is fixed irreversibly and for ever. The most undaunted lover of paradox would hardly undertake to wash white that ensanguined fame.
"In the month of July, a year and a half ago," so deposes a native tradesman, eighteen months after the massacre, "I was in my house at Ooghoo, when ten or eleven persons, who had fled from Cawnpore, came to my shop, and asked for betel-leaf to chew. I showed them new betel-leaf; when two of them, both Hindoos, told me to fetch good old betel-leaf, or they would take my head off. I accordingly went to another seller of betel-leaf, and bought the kind they asked for, and told them the price of the same, namely ten pice. The two men said they would only give me two. I replied that the betel-leaf was worth ten pice, and that they ought at the least to give me eight pice: on which they said that they would kill me and all my family. I stated I was a poor man, and had got the betel-leaf from another person. They then said that they had shown no pity to the ladies and children whom they had just murdered, and who clung to their feet, and that they would have no pity upon me. They frightened me greatly, showing me a naked sword, covered with blood, and said that they would cut off my head with the same. I wept," says this weak-minded young man, "and my mother, hearing me cry, came out, and begged of them not to hurt me, and that she would let them have more betel-leaf. After this they drew water from a well close to my house, near a temple, and, conversing among themselves, I heard their companions ask the two men how many ladies they had killed. They replied that they had murdered twenty-one ladies and children, and had received a reward of twenty-one rupees; and added that at first the Nana ordered the sepoys to massacre the ladies; but they refused; and that they two, with three others, carried out the Nana's orders."