flash of lightning showed the horses with heaving flanks and nodding
heads, the men, white eye-balled, glaring beside them and the stone
watch-tower to the left. This time there was no head at the window,
and the rude iron-clamped shutter that could turn a rifle bullet was
closed.

'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 had 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: