, and if I cannot get rid of
them we shall all starve before we accomplish what we wish. They
dawdle behind picking up wild fruits, and over our last march (which
we accomplished on the morning of the eighth day) they took from
fourteen to twenty-two days. Retaining their brutal feelings to the
last they killed the donkey which I lent to the havildar to carry his
things, by striking it on the head when in boggy places into which
they had senselessly driven it loaded; then the havildar came on (his
men pretending they could go no further from weakness), and killed the
young buffalo and eat it when they thought they could hatch up a
plausible story. They said it had died, and tigers came and devoured
it--they saw them. "Did you see the stripes of the tiger?" said I. All
declared that they saw the stripes distinctly. This gave us an idea of
their truthfulness, as there is no striped tiger in all Africa. All
who resolved on skulking or other bad behaviour invariably took up
with the sepoys; their talk seemed to suit evil-doers, and they were
such a disreputable-looking lot that I was quite ashamed of them. The
havildar had no authority, and all bore the sulky dogged look of
people going where they were forced but hated to go. This hang-dog
expression of countenance was so conspicuous that I many a time have
heard the country people remark, "These are the slaves of the party."
They have neither spirit nor pluck as compared with the Africans, and
if one saw a village he turned out of the way to beg in the most
abject manner, or lay down and slept, the only excuse afterwards
being, "My legs were sore." Having allowed some of them to sleep at
the fire in my house, they began a wholesale plunder of everything
they could sell, as cartridges, cloths, and meat, so I had to eject
them. One of them then threatened to shoot my interpreter Simon if he
got him in a quiet place away from the English power. As this threat
had been uttered three times, and I suspect that something of the kind
had prevented the havildar exerting his authority, I resolved to get
rid of them by sending them back to the coast by the first trader. It
is likely that some sympathizers will take their part, but I strove to
make them useful. They had but poor and scanty fare in a part of the
way, but all of us suffered alike. They made themselves thoroughly
disliked by their foul talk and abuse, and if anything tended more
than another to show me that theirs was a m