turally a man who is trusted wrongly is far more
dangerous than one who is held in suspicion. But it never was the
slightest use endeavoring to persuade an average English officer that
his own man could be anything but loyal. He may be a thief and a liar
and a proved-up rogue in every other way; but as for fearing to let him
sleep about the house, or fearing to let him cook his master's food,
or fearing to let him carry firearms--well! Perhaps, it is conceit, or
maybe just ordinary foolishness. It is not fear!

So, in a country where the art of poisoning has baffled analysts since
analysts have been invented, and where blood-hungry fanatic priests,
both Hindu and Mohammedan, were preaching and promising the reward
of highest heaven to all who could kill an Englishman or die in the
attempt, a native cook whose antecedents were obscured in mystery cooked
dinner for a British general, and marched with his column to perform the
same service while the general tried to trounce the cook's friends and
relatives!

But General Baines felt perfectly at ease about his food. He never gave
a thought to it, but ate what was brought to him, sitting his horse most
likely, and chewing something as he rode among the men, and saw that
they filled their bellies properly. He had made up his mind to march on
Harumpore, and to take over the five-hundred-strong contingent there.
Then he could swoop down on any of a dozen other points, in any one of
which a blow would tell.

He was handicapped by knowing almost too much. He had watched so long,
and had suspected for so long that some sort of rebellion was brewing
that, now that it had come, his brain was busy with the tail-ends of
a hundred scraps of plans. He was so busy wondering what might be
happening to all the other men subordinate to him, who would have to be
acting on their own initiative, that his own plans lacked something of
directness. But there was no lack of decision, and no time was lost. The
men marched, and marched their swiftest, in the dust-laden Indian heat.
And he marched with them, in among them, and ate what the cook brought
him, without a thought but for the best interests of the government he
served.

So they buried General Baines some eighty-and-twenty miles from
Harumpore, and shot the cook. And, according to the easy Indian
theology, the cook was wafted off to paradise, while General Baines
betook himself to hell, or was betaken. But the column, three thousand
pe