Our old friend was now in high spirits. His turn had come, and he showed himself fully equal to the occasion. "I continued," he says, "to attend on the Sahibs with a view of performing acts of loyalty. I set to work to find out what men of the city have been loyal, and which of them disloyal, and how some of the public officers came to present themselves to the Nana, while others contrived not to present themselves. I laboured night and day at great personal inconvenience to learn full particulars about these people. I questioned only honourable and upright men, and no others." He is especially disturbed at the assurance of one, Narain Rao, "who, just as I anticipated, wishes to pass himself off as a well-wisher to the Government. But there is a great crowd at this moment, and the Sahibs have no time to spare. It is also very difficult to find witnesses against him by private enquiries, and I see no chance of filing a complaint about it before any officer." It seems strange that the Sahibs could not afford time to pay off an old score that had really been incurred. After the first outbreak of joy and welcome the inhabitants of Cawnpore began to be aware that the English were no longer the same men, if indeed they were men at all. The citizens, with their wives and children, poured forth into the country by crowds, without stopping to calculate whether they could establish their innocence. At such an assize, and in the eyes of such a jury, absence was the only defence that could avail aught. From noon till midnight, on the Lucknow and Delhi highway were to be seen immense mobs rushing eastward and westward in headlong haste. They did well both for their own security and for our honour. The heat of the climate and the conflict, the scarcity of food and the constant presence of disease, the talk which they had heard at Calcutta, the deeds that they had been allowed and even enjoined to commit during their upward progress, had depraved the conscience and destroyed the self-control of our unhappy soldiers. Reckless as men who for many weeks had never known what it was to be certain of another hour's life,--half starved, and more than half intoxicated,--they regarded carnage as a duty and rapine as a pleasure. Havelock, in a report to the Commander in Chief, thus writes: "I have ordered all the beer, wine, spirits, and every drinkable thing at Cawnpore, to be purchased by the Commissariat. It will then be guarded by a few men. If it remained at Cawnpore it would require half my force to keep it from being drunk up by the other half, and I should not have a soldier in camp. While I was winning a victory on the sixteenth some of my men were plundering the Commissariat on the line of march."