There was no room for Tooni to ride when they started. She walked
alongside carrying the baby and its little bundle of clothes.
There was nothing else to carry, and that was fortunate, for the
cart in which the memsahib lay was too full of sick and wounded to
hold anything more. In Tooni's pocket a little black book swung to
and fro; it was the memsahib's book; and in the beginning of the
firing, before the fever came, Tooni had seen the memsahib reading
it long and often. They had not been killed in consequence, Tooni
thought; there must be a protecting charm in the little black book;
so she slipped it into her pocket. They left the looking-glass
behind.
The ox-cart passed out creaking, in its turn, beyond the earthworks
of the English encampment into the city, where the mutinous natives
stood in sullen curious groups to watch the train go by. A hundred
yards through the narrow streets, choked with the smell of
gunpowder and populous with vultures, and Abdul heard a quick voice
in his ear. When he turned, none were speaking, but he recognised
in the crowd the lowering indifferent face of a sepoy he knew--one
of the Nana Sahib's servants. Saying nothing, he fell back for
Tooni and laid his hand upon her arm. And when the cart creaked
out of the town into the crowded, dusty road that led down to the
ghat, neither Abdul nor Tooni were in the riotous crowd that
pressed along with it.
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