Ch. VIII ]
 

Kumar Singh and Amar Singh
 

CHAPTER VIII

KUMAR SINGH AND AMAK SINGH
 

Hunted out of the valleys of Jagadishpur by General Eyre,
Kumar Singh, the old but energetic lion of the territory of
Shahabad, was roaming restlessly but always on the alert for
every chance to spring at the neck of those who had deprived
him of his liberty. Under his banner had united his brother
Amar Singh and two other chiefs, Nisswar Singh and Jawan
Singh. They were now lying in wait in the forests. With
them were their beloved wives. Zenana women, but ready to
join in the fight, combing their hair not with the delicate
combs of the Zenana but with sharp arrows, flourishing in their
delicately fashioned hands, * tenderer than the very flower,"
the flashing Damascus blade, " harder than adamant." They were,
also, waiting to drink the blood of the enemy! To drink the
blood of the enemy, we say again; for, old as Kumar Singh
was and proudly insolent as his opponent was, the ambition of
Kumar Singh was nothing short of drinking the enemy's blood!
For, though " reduced to extremities with hunger, besieged by
age,—a picture of hard misery, with no position, and courting
death," as the lion of the famous poem, our Kumar was still the
the king of the forest! And, therefore, whatever the reverses, ho w
would he eat the dead grass of slavery? His ambition was—one
ambition alone could be the ambition of the lion of the poem
refered to—to break open, with his paw, the skull of the elephant!

With the land belonging to his family for generations as far as
your memory could go now usurped by the stranger, with his very
palace   of  Jagadishpur  in  the  hands of the foreigner, and his

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