“My courage failed me,” he confesses, “while in the water, and if my guide had been within my reach I should perhaps have pulled him back and abandoned the enterprise. But he waded quickly through the stream, and, reaching the opposite bank, went crouching up a ditch for three hundred yards to a grove of low trees on the edge of a pond, where we stopped to dress.” His confidence having returned, Kavanagh went boldly forward, tulwar on shoulder, and even dared to accost a matchlock man near a hut with a remark that the night was cold. A little farther on they were pulled up by the officer of a native picket, and Kunoujee Lal, acting as spokesman, explained that they had come from Mundeon (“our old cantonment”) and were making their way to their homes in the city. This satisfied the sepoy officer, and they passed on with no little relief. Recrossing the river by the iron bridge, they safely negotiated the streets of Lucknow, though the place swarmed with sentries and armed men, and issuing at last from the city on the other side, breathed more freely. “I was in great spirits when we reached the green fields, into which I had not been for five months,” says Kavanagh. “Everything around us smelt sweet, and a carrot I took from the roadside was the most delicious I had ever tasted.” A wrong turning now led them astray into the Dilkusha Park, where the rebels had a battery. Much against his companion’s will, the daring Irishman insisted on inspecting these guns, and Kunoujee Lal was in considerable trepidation until after two hours’ weary tramping across paddy fields and canal cuttings they regained the right road. At two o’clock in the morning, after several alarms from suspicious villagers who chased them some distance, they stumbled upon a picket of twenty-five sepoys on the outskirts of the city. Kavanagh was for the bold course of going up and questioning the men, but Kunoujee Lal lost heart and threw away the letter entrusted to him for Sir Colin Campbell. Kavanagh kept his still concealed in his turban. The picket was in some alarm at their approach, but it proved to be fear lest the pair were Englishmen from the Alumbagh camp, only a mile or two in advance of them! With this cheering news, the two spies pushed on, a friendly sepoy having put them on the right road on hearing that they were “walking to the village of Umroula on a sad errand, namely, to inform a friend that his brother had been killed by a ball from the British entrenchments at Lucknow.”