In the mean while, Brigadier Shelton, with a body of infantry and artillery, had made his way to the Balla Hissar, and arrived in time to cover the retreat of Campbell’s regiment, and to save the guns from the grasp of the enemy. “Soon after my arrival,” says the Brigadier in his narrative of these proceedings, “wounded men were coming in from the city. I was then informed that they belonged to the King’s Hindostanee Pultun, which his Majesty had sent into the city with two six-pounders. I despatched the light company of the 54th N.I. to the gate of the Balla Hissar leading into the town, and soon after the remainder of the King’s Pultun and the two guns were driven in. The latter they were obliged to abandon, fortunately sufficiently under the wall to enable me to prevent the enemy from getting possession; but too near the houses for me to bring them in. I disposed a covering party accordingly, but on the enemy’s opening his fire, the Shah’s men rushed back into the gateway, and thus abandoned the enterprise.” “I mention this,” adds the Brigadier, “because it was said his Majesty was implicated in exciting the rebellion—for in such case he never would have made so noble an effort, and the only one that was made to strike at the root.”[108] On that day nothing else was done. Deserted by his personal attendants in the hour of danger, Shah Soojah seems to have sunk into a pitiable state of dejection and alarm. The defeat of his Hindostanees had given a deeper shade to his despondency; he was incapable of acting for himself or of offering counsel to others, and all who sought his presence were struck by the anxious expression of his countenance and the feeble petulance of his manner. Nothing effective had been done, and nothing more was to be done at all on that memorable day—General Elphinstone had been talking about to-morrow, when he should have been acting to-day. And so the evening of the 2nd of November fell upon an irritable people, established and fortified in resistance by the indecision of the authorities, against whom they had erected themselves, and the inactivity of the army by which they might have been crushed.