What was Nicholson’s fighting quality, indeed, may be judged, say, from the fashion in which he smashed up the mutinous Sepoys at Mardan (as told in Trotter’s “Life” of him), and chased them mile after mile towards the hills of Swat, Nicholson leading the pursuit on his huge grey charger, “his great sword felling a Sepoy at every stroke!” His faculty for strategy, and for swift, sustained movement is, again, told by the manner in which he intercepted and destroyed the Sealkote mutineers at the fords of the Ravi on their way to Delhi, The mutineers were two days’ march ahead of him, and Nicholson made a forced march of forty-four miles in a single day, and under a July sun in India, to get within stroke of them. Nicholson’s little force started at 9 P.M. on July 10, and marched twenty-six miles without a break; after a halt of two hours they started on their second stage of eighteen miles at 10 A.M. During the hottest hour of the afternoon the force camped in a grove of trees, and the men fell, exhausted, into instant slumber. Presently an officer, awakening, looked round for his general. “He saw Nicholson,” says Trotter, “in the middle of the hot, dusty road, sitting bolt upright on his horse in the full glare of that July sun, waiting like a sentinel turned to stone for the moment when his men should resume their march!” They might take shelter from the heat, but he scorned it. A march so swift and fierce was followed by an attack equally vehement, Nicholson leading the rush on the enemy’s guns in person, and with his own sword cutting literally in two a rebel gunner in the very act of putting his linstock to the touch-hole of his cannon. The worship of force is natural to the Eastern mind; and, in 1848, when Nicholson was scouring the country between the Attock and the Jhelum, making incredible marches, and shattering with almost incredible valour whole armies with a mere handful of troops, the mingled admiration and dread of the native mind rose to the pieties of a religion. “To this day,” a border chief told Younghusband, twelve years after Nicholson was dead, “our women at night wake trembling, and saying they hear the tramp of Nikalsain’s war-horse!” A brotherhood of Fakirs renounced all other creeds, and devoted themselves to the worship of “Nikkul-Seyn.” They would lie in wait for Nicholson, and fall at his feet with votive offerings.