The two men, by dint of peremptory commands and vigorous blows with the naked sword, forced their way step by step through the crowd.  But after a lapse of ten minutes they had scarcely progressed more than a hundred yards.  The surging mob around them became even denser and more threatening in its attitude, and Heideck saw it would be impossible to reach the citadel.

With anxious care for the precious human lives entrusted to his protection, he looked about for another place of safety.  But the Europeans had firmly barricaded their houses, and none of them would have opened to admit the poor fugitives.  On a sudden the wild cries that had almost terrified the crying children to death rose to appalling shrieks and ravings, and a mob of demons, incited by their fanatic passions almost to frenzy, rushed from a side street straight upon Heideck.  They had somewhere on their way been joined by a large number of other female fugitives; and the sight of these unhappy creatures made the German officer’s blood run cold in his veins.

The women, among whom were two girls yet on the borders of childhood, had had their clothes torn from their bodies, and they were now being hustled along under such constant ill-usage that they were bleeding from numerous wounds.

Unable further to curb the wrath that rose within him at the sight of this brutality, Heideck took his revolver from his belt, and with a well-aimed shot sent one of the howling, fanatic devils to the ground.

But his action was not well-advised.  Although his martial appearance had up till then kept this cowardly crew away from acts of violence against himself and his party, the furious rage of the mob now knew no bounds.

In the next moment the small party found itself hemmed in by a knot of raging black devils, and Heideck was no longer in doubt that it was only a question of bravely fighting to the death.  The foremost of the more violent of their assailants he was able to keep off by firing at them the last five shots that remained in his revolver.  The last shot snuffed out the light of a black-bearded fellow just at the very moment when he was attacking Edith Irwin with his brutal fists.  Then Heideck threw his revolver, useless in that he could not load it afresh, into the face of one of the grinning fiends, and clasping his left arm, which was now free, round Edith, and pressing her tightly to him, carried on a desperate struggle with his sword.

For Mrs. Baird and her children he could do nothing further.  Now that he had seen his faithful Morar Gopal fall under the blows of some Mohammedans he felt that they were irretrievably lost.  He had seen how the Colonel’s wife had had her clothes torn in shreds from her body; he heard the heartrending cry of anguish with which, under the blows and thrusts of her inhuman torturers, she called for her children.  But at all events he was spared the agony of seeing with his own eyes the end of the innocent little girls.  They disappeared from his view in the terrible confusion, and as they were besides already half dead from terror, Providence would, at all events, have the pity not to let them feel the tortures of the death which their unfeeling butchers had prepared for them.