Page:Our Indian Army.djvu/365

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OUR ANGLO-INDIAN ARMY.
341

which he managed to cross safe from the alligators with which it abounds. This officer contrived to reach the cavalry" station at Arcot, sixteen miles distant, about seven o'clock in the morning, where he communicated an account of the proceedings at Vellore to Lieutenant-Colonel Gillespie, commanding H.M. 19th regiment of Light Dragoons, then quartered at Arcot.

With all the energy and bravery by which he was so eminently distinguished, Colonel Gillespie started, within fifteen minutes after he received the intelligence, with a single troop of his regiment; and ordering the remainder, with the galloper-guns, to follow with all possible speed, he and his men cleared the distance in an hour and ten minutes.

So eager was Gillespie to reach his destination that he was considerably in advance of his troop when Sergeant Brodie, who had expended his last cartridge, descried him from the top of the gateway. Brodie, who had served with him in St. Domingo, turned to his drooping comrades and said, "If Colonel Gillespie be alive, here he is at the head of the 19th Dragoons, and God Almighty has sent him from the West Indies to save our lives in the East!"

Regardless of his own safety, and in the face of a furious fire poured upon him from the walls and close round towers, Gillespie pushed towards the bastion and the gateway. There a chain, formed of the soldiers' belts, being let down, the Colonel grasped it and was pulled up the face of the work. The poor survivors of the 69th received him with shouts of welcome as their deliverer, promptly formed at his word of command, charged with the bayonet, and drove the mutineers headlong from that part of the works.

The arrival of Colonel Gillespie was soon after followed by that of the galloper-guns of his regiment, which were at once brought to play upon the principal gates of the fort, and blew them open. By this time the whole of the 19th, with a strong troop of the 7th Native Cavalry, had