The fakir's time had come, and the prisoners' time had come. But
Sergeant William Brown's had not.
They found him, blackened by powder, and with every stitch of clothing
blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond.
There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton
of broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof
that he had come belched out of a holocaust. The men who came on
him had given their officer the slip, and were bent on a private
looting-expedition of their own. But by the time that they had dragged
him from the water, and he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe
himself, their thoughts of plunder had departed from them. Brown
had a way of quite monopolizing people's thoughts!
There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all
through the morning and the afternoon that followed. He held them
together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered
and compelled them through the hell-tumult of the ghastliest thing
there is beneath the dome of heaven--house-to-house fighting in an
Eastern city.
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