The old soldier's eye sparkled with stern approval as he saw filing into the fort three or four squadrons of Rajput horse (than whom there were no better riders or harder fighters in all India), and several companies of Rohilla foot--men whom their greatest leader had rightly declared to be "the best of all Sepoys at the cold steel."
With such men at his back, the colonel would have faced a whole native army; and he lost no time in scouring the jungle in quest of his skulking foes.
His style of campaigning would have sorely displeased those learned gentlemen who, sitting at home in England over their books and diagrams, lay down the law about "throwing out flankers," and performing this or that manœuvre amid thickets as dense as themselves, through which you may struggle for hours without sight or sound of an enemy, while passing again and again so close to the hidden foe whom you are hunting, that he could touch you with his spear if he chose. (A fact.) But, unscientific as it might be, the colonel's mode of fighting was eminently successful, as the jackals and vultures of the jungle could have told for many a day.
The savage chief himself, indeed, managed to escape; but he was almost the only survivor of his band, and there was no more trouble with the Dacoits that season.
But hardly was the work done when a wild legend began to creep abroad, that the three slain British soldiers, Bob Burton, Sam Black, and Tom Tuffen had come to life again, and had been seen fighting in the ranks of the brigands! Several of Colonel Hardman's native followers had recognised them, and all told the same story.
But when the English Grenadiers heard the tale, they laughed it to scorn.
"Rubbish!" growled a hard-faced old fellow, whose scarred visage looked like an ill-drawn railway map. "Rise from the dead, indeed! if _I_ was once dead, I'd never be sitch a fool as to git up and 'ave it all over agin, I knows that! They've jist desarted, and j'ined Kala Bagh. I remember now as I see'd him, when he was made-up as a juggler, say some'at to Tom, and to Sam Black too. They've desarted, that's wot they've done; and if it warn't for the shame of herdin' with sitch scum as them coffee-coloured thieves yonder, I'm blowed if _I_ wouldn't desart too."