"I f they're a-goin' to kill me, why don't they look sharp and git it over? If I 'ad the killin' o' them, I'd be quick enough about it, I knows that!"
So growled a solitary prisoner in the "black-hole" of a British outpost in Upper Bengal one hot May morning in 1803.
Though dark compared with the blistering glare outside, the cell was light enough to show its tenant in all his squalid and savage disorder. With his clothes almost torn from his back, his face smeared with dust and blood, and a scowl of sullen desperation on his hard, low-browed, ruffianly features, he looked like what too many of the Company's soldiers were, in days when it drew its recruits chiefly from the prison and the hulks, and often enough from the gallows itself.
His mouth was parched with thirst (for no one had thought of bringing him water), his bruised limbs were all one pain, his bound hands kept him from defending himself against the flies that swarmed around his wounded face, hardly to be scared away by incessant jerkings of his aching head. Well, what did it all matter? He would soon be past pain and thirst, and feeling of any kind; or, if there really was anything after that—well, God couldn't be harder on him than the colonel had been, anyhow.
They would shoot him, of course; for he knew what a charge of "attempting to stir up mutiny" meant at a time when England's half-formed power in the East stood like a rock amid a thousand roaring waves, with all India raging around it. Well, let them! he would at least die game, and spite "Old Blue-Beard," who would want to see him flinch.
Just then a clear, childish voice was heard outside—the voice of the colonel's only child, a bright little lad of seven, who was the pet of the whole barrack, and even more loved (if such a thing could be) than his father was hated.
"Oh, please let me in; I do want to see poor Bob!"
"Can't, lovey, can't indeed," replied the sentry's deep tones; "it's yer par's orders as no one's to pass in. I'd let yer in if I could, I would indeed; but orders is orders, you know."
And the voices died away.
The doomed man's face softened for a moment into such a look as he might have worn long ago, when he was a child himself.