"Go on, men," said the Major. "Get up to the top at any rate!" The squadron toiled forward, the horses wagging their tails and the men pulling at the bridles, the stones rolling down the hillside and the sparks flying. Lieutenant Halley declares that he never heard a squadron make so much noise in his life. They scrambled up, he said, as though each horse had eight legs and a spare horse to follow him. Even then there was no sound from the watch-tower, and the men stopped exhausted on the ridge that overlooked the pit of darkness in which the village of Bersund lay. Girths were loosed, curb-chains shifted, and saddles adjusted, and the men dropped down among the stones. Whatever might happen now, they held the upper ground of any attack.
The thunder ceased, and with it the rain, and the soft thick darkness of a winter night before the dawn covered them all.
Except for the sound of falling water among the ravines below, everything was still. They heard the shutter of the watch-tower below them thrown back with a clang, and the voice of the watcher calling, "Oh, Hafiz Ullah!"The echoes took up the call, "La-la-la!" and an answer came from the watch-tower hidden round the curve of the hill, "What is it, Shahbaz Khan?"Shahbaz Khan replied in the high-pitched voice of the mountaineer:
"Hast thou seen?"
The answer came back: "Yes. God deliver us from all evil spirits!
There was a pause, and then: "Hafiz Ullah, I am alone! Come to me.""Shahbaz Khan, I am alone also; but I dare not leave my post!""That is a lie; thou art afraid."
A longer pause followed, and then: "I am afraid. Be silent! They are below us still. Pray to God and sleep."The troopers listened and wondered, for they could not understand what save earth and stone could lie below the watch-towers.
Shahbaz Khan began to call again: "They are below us. I can see them! For the pity of God come over to me, Hafiz Ullah! My father slew ten of them. Come over!"Hafiz Ullah answered in a very loud voice, "Mine was guiltless.
Hear, ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any part in that sin. Bear thou thine own punishment, Shahbaz Khan.""Oh, some one ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like cocks there," said the Lieutenant, shivering under his rock.
He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain before a bearded, long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the hill, and tumbled into his arms. Halley sat upon him, and thrust as much of a sword-hilt as could be spared down the man's gullet.
"If you cry out, I kill you," he said cheerfully.
The man was beyond any expression of terror. He lay and quaked, gasping. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley's arm, feeling it from elbow to wrist.
"The Rissala! The dead Rissala! " he gasped, "It is down there!""No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala. It is up here,"said Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle and fastening the man's hands. "Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us pass?""The valley is full of the dead," said the Afghan. "It is better to fall into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead.
