A tall bandit sprang at them both with uplifted weapon, only to fall dead instantly, cut down through cap and skull to the very teeth; but Hardman's sword snapped with the force of the blow, and the robber-chief himself, the terrible "Black Tiger," thinking him disarmed and at his mercy, flew at the Englishman's throat with a laugh of savage joy.
The two men met like conflicting whirlwinds. A flash of steel—a whiz—a red stain on the colonel's white sleeve—a dull thud—a crunch like the breaking of a snow-crust—and Kala Bagh, the most dreaded bandit of the district, lay dead on the trampled earth, with his skull smashed in like an egg-shell, while over his corpse the colonel's horse and its double burden dashed away into the deeper shadows beyond.
"The two men met like conflicting whirlwinds."
For many a day after, the superstitious Mussulmans of Kalipur told to their friends, with bated breath and looks of awe, how, in the first grey of dawn, the Angel of Death had come rushing through their town in the likeness of an English warrior—stained with blood, and with a dead man behind him on his black horse—and had carried away the Hakeem Ingrez (English doctor) along with him. But, in the end, their angel of death proved to be an angel of life; for the new doctor did his work well, and the sick boy was saved!
The robbers, cowed by their formidable leader's fall, made no attempt at pursuit, and, in truth, there were but few of them left to pursue; for, out of nineteen men, six had been slain outright, and four more desperately wounded.
But, over and above the nineteen who had taken so active a part in the fray, there were three more of the gang who had been strangely backward from first to last. All three were in Eastern dress, and almost as dark as their dusky comrades; but, had they been black as negroes, their speech would have told at once what they really were.
"Well done the old regiment!" cried the tallest of the three, with a look of savage and reluctant admiration after the vanishing form of the colonel. "It's hard to beat yet—ain't it, Tom?"
"Right you are, Sam," replied Tom Tuffen; "and the old country's 'ard to beat, too! One true Englishman agin a dozen o' these coffee-coloured thieves, any day!"