"Aye," cried Tom Tuffen fiercely, "that's jist how I felt that time at Krishnabad, when I axed that old sepoy as comed there with the major, to give me a drink o' water. D'ye remember wot the old chap said? 'Ismail Beg gives his lotah (brass cup) to no man who is not worthy. I am a nimmuk-wallah[6]—I have been true to my salt; but what art thou?' Now, how do you think a Englishman feels when he finds out that even a common blackamoor's ashamed of him!"
"And d'ye see that 'ere flag yonder?" added Sam Black grimly, as he pointed to the British colours that waved jauntily in the last gleam of sunset, above the low white wall of a fort not more than a mile away. "That's the English flag, that is; and here be three Englishmen as daren't show their faces a-nigh it!"
Then followed a long and gloomy silence, each of the three unhappy men being wholly absorbed in his own sombre thoughts, as if they had now begun to realise, for the first time, the full depth of their degradation, and felt at last the whole bitterness of the harrowing contrast between what they might have been and what they were.
"It's all his fault!" muttered Bob Burton at length, his voice sounding strange and hollow amid the deepening darkness. "If he hadn't druv us to it, we wouldn't have j'ined Kala Bagh's riff-raff; and if we hadn't took up with them, we shouldn't ha' been where we are now. By Jingo, if I could have a wish granted me just this very minute, I knows wot it 'ud be!"
"To cotch 'im somewhere by hisself, and pay him out once for all—eh, Bob?" said Tom Tuffen, in a hoarse whisper.
Burton nodded silently, and Sam Black gave an assenting growl, as deadly in its meaning as the hiss of a rattlesnake.
But that menacing sound died away into a stifled gasp of terror, as there started out all at once from the encircling blackness into the ring of light cast by the fire—plain before the startled eyes of all three—a slender white figure, and a bright, smooth, child-like face, framed in golden hair!
"Is it a h'angel, Bob?" asked Sam Black, in a tremulous whisper.
"Is it a h'angel?"