This time there was no letter from Frank, and the alarmed, half-despairing girl could only learn that the major-sahib was not with the column, which had been compelled to fall back on Cawnpore after some heavy fighting in Oudh. Ungud did not think he was dead; but who could tell? There were so many sahibs who fell, for out of his twelve hundred Havelock had lost nearly half, and was now eating his heart out in a weary wait for re-enforcements that were toiling up the thousand miles of road and river from Calcutta. So the blackness of disappointed hope fell on the Residency and its inmates. Those few natives who had hitherto proved faithful began to desert in scores. About a third of the European soldiers were dead. Smallpox and cholera added their ravages to the enemy's unceasing fire and occasional fierce assaults. Famine and tainted water, and lack of hospital stores, and every evil device of malign fate that persecutes people in such straits, were there to harass the unhappy defenders. Officers and men swore that they would shoot their women-folk with their own hands rather than permit them to fall into the rebels' clutches, and, at times, when the siege slackened a little in its continuous cannonade, the devoted community gave way to lethargy and despondency. But let the enemy muster for an attack, these veteran soldiers faced them with the dogged steadfastness that made them gods among the Asiatic scum. The Brigadier, too, never allowed his splendid spirit to flag. Though for three months he had not slept without being fully dressed, though he worked harder than any other man in the garrison, he was the life and soul of every outpost that he visited during the day or night. Captain Fulton was another human dynamo in their midst. Finding plenty of miners among the Cornishmen of the 32d, he sunk a countermine for each mine burrowed by the enemy. His favorite amusement was to sit alone for hours in a shaft, wait patiently until the rebels bored a way up to him, and then shoot the foremost workers. And in such fashion the siege went on, with houses collapsing, because they were so riddled with cannon-balls that the walls gave way, and ever-nearing sapping of the fortifications, and intolerable breaks in the monsoon, when the heat became so overpowering that even the natives yielded to the strain--and the days passed, and the weeks, and the months, until, on September 16, Ungud, tempted by a bribe of five thousand rupees, crept away for the last time with despatches for Havelock. CHAPTER XIV WHY MALCOLM DID NOT WRITE It was the saddest hour in Havelock's life when he decided that his Invincibles must retreat. Yet, after another week's fighting, that course was forced on him.