When Havelock’s men afterwards entered those rooms, one little detail bore mute witness to the use to which some of the ladies had turned the few minutes which followed the volley of the Sepoys. They evidently tore strips from their dresses, and with them tried to tie the door fast; and still those broken strips of linen and silk were hanging from the door handles when Havelock’s men, two days afterwards, entered Cawnpore. Crime never wants instruments, and Nana Sahib soon found scoundrels willing to carry out his orders. It was a little after five o’clock—just when Stephenson’s Fusileers and Hamilton’s Highlanders were sweeping over the bridge at Pandoo Nuddee—that five men, each carrying a tulwar, walked to the door of the Bebeeghur. Two were rough peasants; two belonged to the butcher’s caste; one wore the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard. The five men entered, and the shuddering crowd of women and children was before them. The crowd, who watched as the door opened, saw standing erect on the threshold the English lady who had asked the native officer whether they were all to be killed. Then the door was closed, and over the scene that followed the horrified imagination refuses to linger. Wailing, broken shrieks, the sound of running feet crept out on the shuddering air. Presently the door opened, and the man in the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard came out with his sword broken short off at the hilt. There were 212 to be killed, and the strain on steel blades as well as on human muscles was severe! He borrowed a fresh sword, and went back to his work, again carefully closing the door behind him. After a while he re-emerged once more with a broken blade, and, arming himself afresh, returned a third time to his dreadful business. It was dark when the five men—all alike now with reddened garments—came out and locked the door behind them, leaving that great company of wives and mothers and little children in the slaughter-house. The men had done their work but roughly, and all through the night, though no cry was heard in the Bebeeghur, yet sounds, as if sighs from dying lips, and the rustle as of struggling bodies, seemed to creep out into the darkness incessantly through its sullen windows and hard-shut doors. At eight o’clock the next morning the five men returned, attended by a few sweepers. They opened the door, and commenced to drag the nearer bodies, by their long tresses of hair, across the courtyard to the fatal well, hard by. Then, amongst the bodies lying prone over all the floor, there was a sudden stir of living things. Were the dead coming back to life?