At last, and just before the dawn, a green rocket shot up from the
far side of the valley of Bersund, at the head of the gorge, to show
that the Goorkhas were in position. A red light from the infantry at
left and right answered it, and the cavalry burnt a white flare.
Afghans in winter are late sleepers, and it was not till full day
that the Gulla Kutta Mullah's men began to straggle from their huts,
rubbing their eyes. They saw men in green, and red, and brown
uniforms, leaning on their arms, neatly arranged all round the crater
of the village of Bersund, in a cordon that not even a wolf could
have broken. They rubbed their eyes the more when a pink-faced young
man, who was not even in the Army, but represented the Political
Department, tripped down the hillside with two orderlies, rapped at
the door of the Gulla Kutta Mullah's house, and told him quietly to
step out and be tied up for safe transport. That same young man
passed on through the huts, tapping here one cateran and there
another lightly with his cane; and as each was pointed out, so he was
tied up, staring hopelessly at the crowned heights around where the
English soldiers looked down with incurious eyes. Only the Mullah
tried to carry it off with curses and high words, till a soldier who
was tying his hands said:--

'None o' your lip! Why didn't you come out when you was ordered,
instead o' keepin' us awake all night? You're no better than my own
barrack-sweeper, you white-'eaded old polyanthus! Kim up!'

Half an hour later the troops had gone away with the Mullah and his
thirteen friends. The dazed villagers were looking ruefully at a pile
of broken muskets and snapped swords, and wondering how in the world
they had come so to miscalculate the forbearance of the Indian