At the back of the mosque ran a narrow lane, bordered by rooms in which many of the flying Sepoys had found shelter. Forbes-Mitchell says they had broken open the door of one of these rooms, and saw it was crowded with Sepoys. He placed some of his party on each side of the door, and sent back two men to the breach to get a few bags of gunpowder, with slow matches fixed, intending to light one of these and fling it into the room, by way of summarily clearing out the Sepoys. At that moment Hodson came quickly up, sword in hand. “Where are the rebels?” he demanded grimly. Forbes-Mitchell’s narrative runs: “I pointed to the door of the room, and Hodson, shouting, ‘Come on,’ was about to rush in. I implored him not to do so, saying ‘It’s certain death; wait for the powder; I’ve sent men for powder-bags.’ Hodson made a step forward, and I put out my hand to seize him by the shoulder to pull him out of the line of the doorway, when he fell back, shot through the chest. He gasped out a few words, either, ‘Oh, my wife,’ or ‘Oh, my mother’—I cannot now rightly remember—but was immediately choked by blood.” Colonel Gordon-Alexander, who took part in the assault, and saw Hodson come on the scene, gives a similar account of the manner in which Hodson received his wound; but it illustrates the unreliability of human testimony to notice how he and Forbes-Mitchell, who were both actors in the tragedy, flatly contradict each other from this point. Gordon-Alexander says that a man of his company, whom he had sent over to warn Hodson, “never stopped, but ran in at the door and pinned the man who had shot Hodson, with his bayonet, before he had time to reload. There was only one other Sepoy in the doorway, and he was bayoneted, too.” Forbes-Mitchell says that after Hodson had been carried off, the bags of powder, with slow matches in them, were brought up. “These we lit, and then pitched the bags in through the door. Two or three bags very soon brought the enemy out, and they were bayoneted. One of the 93rd, a man named Rule, rushed in among the rebels, using both bayonet and butt of his rifle, shouting, ‘Revenge for Hodson!’ and he killed more than half the men single-handed.” But, according to Gordon-Alexander, there were only two Sepoys in the room, and no powder-bags were necessary to drive them out! Hodson was a soldier of real genius, but was pursued through life, and to his very grave, by a swarm of baseless calumnies. When he was buried, Colin Campbell himself stood by the grave, and, as the coffin of the dead soldier sank from sight, the British commander-in-chief burst into tears. Those tears, rolling down the cheeks of so great and fine a soldier, are Hodson’s best vindication and memorial.