'I am only twenty miles, as the crow flies, from your border. Come
and fetch me.'

'Some day we will come,' said the Government, 'and hanged you will
be.'

The Gulla Kutta Mullah let the matter from his mind. He knew that the
patience of the Government was as long as a summer day; but he did
not realise that its arm was as long as a winter night. Months
afterwards when there was peace on the border, and all India was
quiet, the Indian Government turned in its sleep and remembered the
Gulla Kutta Mullah at Bersund, with his thirteen outlaws. The
movement against him of one single regiment--which the telegrams
would have translated as war--would have been highly impolitic. This
was a time for silence and speed, and, above all, absence of
bloodshed.

You must know that all along the north-west frontier of India there
is spread a force of some thirty thousand foot and horse, whose duty
it is quietly and unostentatiously to shepherd the tribes in front of
them. They move up and down, and down and up, from one desolate
little post to another; they are ready to take the field at ten
minutes' notice; they are always half in and half out of a difficulty
somewhere along the monotonous line; their lives are as hard as their
own muscles, and the papers never say anything about them. It was
from this force that the Government picked its men.

One night at a station where the mounted Night Patrol fire as they
challenge, and the wheat rolls in great blue green waves under our