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
Northwest 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. Abelwhite 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 whiskey-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.
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