lives.*

[* I saw these marks on the sufferer.]

About the same time--the latter end of 1846--Maheput Sing sent to
Sheik Sobratee, of the same place, a message through a pausee, named
Bhowanee Deen, demanding twenty-five rupees. This sum was sent; but
six weeks had not elapsed, before Sheik Sobratee received another
demand for the same amount, through the same person. He had no money,
but promised to send the sum in ten days. At midnight, on the fourth
day after this, Maheput and his gang attacked his house, and
plundered it of all they could find, female ornaments, and clothes,
and brass utensils. Sobratee was that night sleeping at the house of
his friend Peree, the wood-dealer, in the same town. Maheput tried to
make his mother and wife point out where he was, by torturing them,
but they either would not or could not do so. After some search,
however, they discovered him, and bound and took him off, with
handcuffs, and an iron collar round his neck, to the Kurseea jungle,
in the Hydergur pergunnah. His son, a boy, had escaped. After
torturing him in the usual way for eight days, they sent a message to
his mother by Maheput's servant, Salar, to say, that unless she sent
a ransom of five hundred rupees, her son's nose and hands should be
cut off and sent to her as those of _Chubbee Lal_, Brahmin, of
Bunnee, had been. She prevailed upon Baroonath Gotum to lend the
money; and Maheput sent Sobratee to him, accompanied by one of his
armed retainers, with orders to make him over to the Gotum, if he
pledged himself in due form to pay. He did so, and Sobratee was made
over to him, and the next day sent home to his wife and mother. Some
months after, however, when he had completed his fort of Bhowneegur,
Maheput sent to demand two hundred rupees more from Sobratee, and
when he found he could not pay, he had his house pulled, down, and
took away all the materials to his fort. What he did not require he
caused to be burnt. He got from Sobratee, in ransom and plunder, more
than three thousand rupees; and he has been ever since reduced to
great poverty and distress.

In November 1847, Maheput Sing and his gang seized and carried off
Khosal, a confectioner, of Talgon, in Rodowlee, who had gone to his
sister at Buhapoor, near Guneshpoor, to attend a marriage--took him
to the jungle, and tortured and starved him in the usual way for five
weeks. He had him burnt with red-hot irons, flogged and ducked in a
tank every day, and dema