The woman, who had torn the black veil from her face, lifted the boy’s head to her breast and cried, "My God! My good God! My boy! Ali! Ali!" But just then the gate gave way with a crash, and the Colonel ordered one of the squadrons to ride into the courtyard of the mosque, where five thousand of the students and their professors could be seen squirming in dense masses like ants on an upturned ant-hill. The soldiers were forcing their horses through the crowds and beating with the flat of their swords when two or three shots were fired from within, and it became certain that some of the students were using firearms. At that the bulldog in the British Colonel got the better of the man, and he wanted to shout a command to his men to use the edge of their weapons and clear the place at any cost, but the shrill cry of the mother over her dead boy drowned his thick voice. "He is dead! They have killed him! My only child! His father died last week. God took him, and now I have nobody. Ali, come back to me! Ali! Ali!" "Take that yelping b—— away!" shouted the Colonel, ripping out an oath of impatience, and that was the moment when Gordon Lord came up. What he did then he could never afterwards remember, but what others saw was that with the spring of a tiger he leapt up to Macdonald, laid hold of him by the collar of his khaki jacket, dragged him from the saddle, flung him headlong on the ground, and stamped on him as if he had been a poisonous snake. In another moment there would have been no more Macdonald, but just then, while the soldiers, recognising their First Staff Officer, stood dismayed, not knowing what it was their duty to do, there came over the sibilant hiss of the crowd the loud clangour of the hoofs of galloping horses, and the native people laid hold of Gordon and carried him away. His great strength was now gone, and he felt himself being dragged out of the hard glare of the light into the shadow of a side street, where he was thrust into a carriage and held down in it by somebody who was saying— "Lie still, my brother! Lie still! Lie still!" For one instant longer he heard deafening shouts through the carriage glass, over the rumble of the moving wheels, and then a blank darkness fell on him for a time and he knew no more. When he recovered consciousness his mind had swung back, with no memory of anything between, to the moment when he was leaving the General’s house, and he was saying to himself again, "I must go back. She may curse me, but I cannot leave her alone. I cannot—I will not." Then he was aware of a voice—it was the quavering voice of an old man, and seemed to come out of a toothless mouth—saying— "Be careful, Michael! His poor hand is injured. We must send for the surgeon."