British taxpayer at home, who insisted on regarding these
exercises as brutal wars of annexation, the Government would
prepare an expensive little field-brigade and some guns, and send
all up into the hills to chase the wicked tribe out of the
valleys, where the corn grew, into the hill-tops, where there was
nothing to eat. The tribe would turn out in full strength and
enjoy the campaign, for they knew that their women would never be
touched, that their wounded would be nursed, not mutilated, and
that as soon as each man's bag of corn was spent they could
surrender and palaver with the English General as though they had
been a real enemy. Afterwards, years afterwards, they would pay
the blood-money, driblet by driblet, to the Government, and tell
their children how they had slain the redcoats by thousands. The
only drawback to this kind of picnic-war was the weakness of the
redcoats for solemnly blowing up with powder their fortified
towers and keeps. This the tribes always considered mean.

Chief among the leaders of the smaller tribes - the little clans
who knew to a penny the expense of moving white troops against
them - was a priest-bandit-chief whom we will call the Gulla Kutta
Mullah. His enthusiasm for Border murder as an art was almost
dignified. He would cut down a mail-runner from pure wantonness,
or bombard a mud-fort with rifle-fire when he knew that our men
needed to sleep. In his leisure moments he would go on circuit
among his neighbours, and try to incite other tribes to devilry.
Also, he kept a kind of hotel for fellow-outlaws in his own
village, which lay in a valley called Bersund. Any respectable
murderer on that section of the frontier was sure to lie up at
Bersund, for it was reckoned an exceedingly safe place. The sole
entry to it ran through a narrow gorge which could be converted