into a death-trap in five minutes. It was surrounded by high
hills, reckoned inaccessible to all save born mountaineers, and
here the Gulla Kutta Mullah lived in great state, the head of a
colony of mud and stone huts, and in each mud hut hung some
portion of a red uniform and the plunder of dead men. The
Government particularly wished for his capture, and once invited
him formally to come out and be hanged on account of the many
murders in which he had taken a direct part. He replied: -

"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 slip 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 to quietly and unostentatiously 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