Towards evening a boat, manned by some sixty Sepoys, appeared in pursuit, but it, too, ran upon a sand-bank, and this gave the sahibs an opportunity at which they leaped with fierce joy. From the sorely battered boat, which had been pelted for nearly two days and nights with bullets, a score of haggard and ragged figures tumbled, and came splashing, with stern purpose, through the shallows. And then, for some twenty breathless minutes, the Sepoys, by way of change, instead of being hunters, became the hunted, and only some half-dozen, who were good swimmers, escaped to tell their comrades what the experience was like. Mowbray Thomson tells the story in disappointingly bald prose. “Instead of waiting for them to attack us,” he says, “eighteen or twenty of us charged them, and few of their number escaped to tell the story.” Night fell black and stormy, and through falling rain and the sighing darkness the boat, with its freight of dead and dying, drifted on. It recalls the ship of which Tennyson sang, with its “dark freight, a vanished life.” In the morning it was found that the boat had drifted into some backwater whence escape was impossible. The Sepoys lined the bank and fired heavily. Vibart, who was dying, but still remained the master spirit of the little company, ordered a sally. “Whilst there was a sound arm among them that could load and fire, or thrust with the bayonet,” says Kaye, “still the great game of the English was to go to the front and smite the enemy, as a race that seldom waited to be smitten.” Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse, with some twelve men of the 82nd and 34th, clambered over the side of the boat, waded ashore, and charged the Sepoys, who fled before them. They pressed eagerly on, shooting and stabbing, but presently found new crowds of the enemy gathering in their rear. The gallant fourteen faced about, and fought their way back to where they had left the boat. Alas! it had vanished. They commenced to march along the river-bank in the direction of Allahabad, with an interval of twenty paces between each man, so as to make the fire of their pursuers less deadly. Shoeless, faint with hunger, bareheaded, they fought their way for some miles. Their pursuers grew rapidly in numbers and daring. One Englishman had fallen; the others wheeled suddenly round, and seized a small Hindu temple, determined to make a last stand there. There was just room enough for the thirteen to stand upright in the little shrine. Their pursuers, after a few minutes’ anxious pause, tried to rush the door; but, as the historian of the fight puts it, “there was no room for any of them inside”—though, as it turned out, a good deal of room was required outside for the dead bodies of those who had made the attempt.