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' keeping 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 Government.

It was a very neat little affair, neatly carried out, and the men
concerned were unofficially thanked for their services.

Yet it seems to me that much credit is also due to another
regiment whose name did not appear in brigade orders, and whose
very existence is in danger of being forgotten.