akir should be
squatting, guarded by British soldiers, who marched on either hand; or
that a Rajput, who could trace his birth from a thousand-year-long line
of royal chieftains, should be sleeping in the bullock-cart behind,
followed closely by a black charger with a British saddle on its back,
which ate corn from the tail-board of the wagon; stranger things, even,
than that a British sergeant should be marching last of all, with his
stern eyes roving a little wildly but his jaw set firm and his tread as
rigid and authoritative and abrupt as though he were marching to inspect
accouterments.

In more than a dozen places, about a dozen men were holding a fort
against an army. They were using every wile and trick and dodge that
ingenuity or inspiration could provide them with, and they were mostly
contriving to hold out. But there were none who did anything more daring
or more unusual than to march to the attack of a city, with a hostile
fakir in the van, and nothing else but their eleven selves and their
rifles to assist them. There is a tremendous difference between
defending when you have to, and attacking when you might retire.

XII.

There were many more causes than one that worked together to make
possible the entry of Brown and his little force into Jailpore. They
were brave men; they were more than brave and they held the ace of
trumps, as Brown had stated, in the person of the fakir known as "He."
But luck favored them as well, and but for luck they must have perished
half a dozen times.

They marched the whole of the first afternoon, and met no one. They only
overtook little straggling parties of rebels, making one and all for
Jailpore, who bolted at the sight of them, imagining them probably to be
the advance-guard of a larger force. The very idiocy of marching eleven
strong through a country infested by their enemies was in their favor.
Nobody could believe that there were no more than eleven of them. Even
the English could not be such lunatics!

That night, they rested for a while, and then went on again. During the
day following they lay in a hollow between some trees and rested, and
slept by turns. They suffered agonies from the heat, and not a little
from hunger, and once or twice they were hard put to it to stop the
Rajput's charger from neighing when a native pony passed along the
nearby road. But night came again, and with it the screen of darkness
for their strange, almost defenseless carav