From Pegu they moved northward, deeper into Burma with the landscape growing wilder by the mile. Every day they stopped at a village, with Marshall talking to the headman as Jack and his men acted as escort in a procedure that grew so familiar, it became routine.
"Bo Ailgaliutlo has a stockade only three days march from here,." Marshall emerged from the hut with what might pass for a smile on his face. "We can be there in two by the river." He looked skyward. "And then we destroy them, man and boy, and burn the stockade to the ground."
"Yes, sir." Jack remembered the artillery and storming parties for the White House Picket and wondered how Marshall intended to capture a stockade held by tenacious Burmese dacoits with a handful of British infantrymen and the crew of a single John Company
