Having stamped out the Mutiny—or, rather, scattered the mutineers—Neill devoted the next two or three days to punishing it. The Governor-General telegraphed orders to push on to Allahabad, but Neill believed in making thorough work, and he wired back, “Can’t move; wanted here.” And for the next three days he kept the gallows busy, and hanged without pause or pity. The Sepoys had shot down their officers, and murdered women and children, and Neill was bent on showing that this was a performance which brought in its track swift and terrible punishment. “Colonel Neill’s hangings” were, no doubt, of heroic scale, and, looked at through the cold perspective of forty years, wear a very black aspect. But Neill, rightly or wrongly, held that to strike, and to strike hard, and to strike swiftly, was the one policy in such a crisis. Benares being secure, Neill pushed on across the seventy miles of dusty, heat-scorched road to Allahabad. He started with only forty-four of his “Lambs,” and covered the seventy miles in two night marches. When they reached the Ganges, almost every fourth man was down with sunstroke, Neill himself being amongst the number, and his men only kept him up by dashing buckets of water over his head and chest. The boat pushed from the bank; it was found to leak at a dozen points, and began to sink. The “blue-caps” relanded, and their officer, Spurgin, called for volunteers to beat the banks of the river in search of another boat. Almost every man able to walk volunteered, and, in the heavy sand of the river-bank, with the furnace-like heat of an Indian sun setting on fire the very air they breathed, the Fusileers began their search for a boat to carry them across to Allahabad. More than one brave fellow fell and died from heat and exhaustion. But a boat was found, the gallant forty crossed, and marched—as many of them as could still keep their feet—a tiny but dauntless band, through the gates of the fort. Other detachments followed quickly, and Neill flung himself with all the fire of his Scottish blood into the task of restoring the British raj in the great city. At daybreak he opened with his guns, from the fort, on the suburb held by the revolted Sepoys, and then sallied out with his scanty force, and burnt it over their rebel heads. “I myself,” he wrote to his wife, “was almost dying from complete exhaustion;” but his fierce spirit overbore the fainting body that carried it. He armed a river steamer with a howitzer and a party of volunteer riflemen, and employed it as a river patrol. He launched the fierce Sikhs—by this time heartily loyal—on the villages.