Juggut Khan, free-lance Rajput and gentleman of fortune, had ridden out of that caldron of Jailpore.  His house was a heap of glowing ashes, and his goods were tossed for and distributed among a company.  But his mark lay indelibly impressed upon the town.  There were three European women and a child who were nowhere to be found; and there was a trail that led from somewhere near the palace to the western gate.  It was a red trail.

In one spot lay a sepoy pierced through by a lance, and with half of the lance-shaft still standing upright in him.  That had been bad art—­sheer playing to the gallery!  Juggut Khan had run him through and tried to lift him on the lance-end for a trophy.  It was luck that saved the day for him that time, not swordsmanship.

But a man who has done what he had done that day may be forgiven.  There lay nine other men behind him where his lance was left, and each of them lay face upward with a round red hole in his anatomy where the lance had entered.

And from the point where he had broken his lance and left it, up to where a self-appointed guard had refused at first to open the city gate for him, there was a trail that did honor to the man who taught him swordsmanship.  One man lay headless, and another’s head was only part of him, because the sword had split it down the middle and the two halves were still joined together at the neck.

There were men who claimed afterward that of the twenty-three who lay between his lance-shaft and the city gate, some five or six had been slain in brawls and looting forays.  And Juggut Khan was never known to discuss the matter.  But the fact remains that every man of them was killed by the blade or point of a cavalry-saber, and that Juggut Khan broke out of the place untouched.

And another fact worthy of record is, that underneath a stone floor, in a building that was partly powder-magazine-surrounded at every end and side by mutineers who searched for them, and very nearly stifled by the dust of decaying ages—­there lay three women and a child, with a jar of water close beside them and a sack of hastily collected things to eat.  They lay there in all but furnace-heat, close-huddled in the darkness, and they shuddered and sobbed and blessed Juggut Khan alternately.  Below them the whispering echoes sighed mysteriously through a maze of tunnels.  Around them, and around their sack of food, the rats scampered.  Above them, where a ten-ton stone trapdoor lay closed over their heads, black powder stood in heaps and sacks and barrels.  Closing the trapdoor had been easy.  One pushed it and it fell.  Not all the mutineers in Jailpore nor Juggut Khan nor any one could open it again without the secret.  And no man living knew the secret.  The three women and the child were safe from immediate intrusion!

Those three women and that child were not so exceptionally placed for India, of that date.  Two of the women had seen their husbands slain that afternoon, before their eyes.  They were mother and daughter and grandson; and the fourth was an English nurse, red-cheeked still from the kiss of English Channel breezes.