Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company
were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine
themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled;
and though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed
to read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command,
still, there were other men who found themselves groping, at least
two years before the Mutiny of '57. They were groping for something
intangible and noiseless and threatening which they felt was there
in a darkness, but which one could not see.
Baines was one of them--Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at Bholat.
His troops were in the center of a spider's web of roads that
criss-crossed and drained a province. There were big trunk arteries,
which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass
of winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks. He
could feel, if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising,
and he was placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the
right spot, should the knife be needed.
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