Their work done, the English soldiers halted, and discovering that the General, who up to the moment when they emerged from the wood had been foremost in the advance, was not with them, they rode back to seek him. Loss of blood from his wound, with the exhaustion which followed hard upon his excitement, had been too much for the old man, who, for the first time in all his life, had swooned away. Fortunately his English servant was by his side. He saw him reel in his saddle and caught him in his arms. By this time, however, the General's senses had returned. When his men rode back for him, he was sitting on the ground under a tree, Kullum Khan supporting him on one side, and his soldier-servant on the other. CHAPTER XXI WITHIN THE WALLS OF MEERUT Within the walls of Meerut, meanwhile, all was confusion and despair. Those of the English and Eurasian residents who had escaped from the massacre of the 10th of May were gathered together, in much closer quarters than they had ever occupied before, tremulously expecting the worst. The British soldiers, burning to be led against the mutineers, were kept day and night upon guard, for the rebels' return with reinforcements, to finish the deadly work they had begun, was hourly expected; but they did not come, and at last it dawned upon the minds of those in authority that, seeing they were within entrenchments, a smaller number of soldiers might serve to guard them. It took some time for this idea to work in the official mind; but, at last, to the intense satisfaction of the soldiers and regimental officers, five hundred men were told off to join the English force which was supposed to be marching on Delhi. It was on the 23rd that the General encountered the detachment from his mutinous regiment in the wood; and, early on the 24th, the force from Meerut was to be in readiness to march. Hence the ambush. The rebels, whose intelligence department was much better managed than ours--they had spies everywhere--knowing exactly what was going to happen, had imagined that, through the General, whom, they believed, they could easily entrap, they might paralyse the action of the English, so far, at least, as to delay, for some days, the march of a detachment from Meerut. They had, as we have seen, most grossly miscalculated. But, meanwhile, the firing had been heard at Meerut, and a gallant young officer, well known to the General, who had been burning to distinguish himself and to redeem the honour of the English arms, gained permission to go out and reconnoitre with a party of fifty horsemen.