“We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower had the worst of it,” continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice.  “It was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off.  We had to hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people on the Malakand from there, while we couldn’t from the Fort itself.  The Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just hides the Pass from us.  Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done.  A Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis firing at him from short range.  How it was he was not hit, I could never understand.  He did it day after day.  It was the bravest and coolest thing I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps.  Prem Singh would have got the Victoria Cross—­” and the Doctor stopped suddenly and his face flushed.

Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to take any note of the narrator’s confusion.  Baldly though it was told, there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give life and vividness to the story.  Here that brave deed had been done and daily repeated.  Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from the tower to the river and the high crags beyond the tower with the hordes of white-clad Swatis, all in their finest robes, like men who have just reached the goal of a holy pilgrimage, as indeed they had.  He saw their standards, he heard the din of their firearms, and high above them on the wall of the tower he saw the khaki-clad figure of a single Sepoy calmly flashing across the valley news of the defenders’ plight.

“Didn’t he get the Victoria Cross?” he asked.

“No,” returned the Doctor with a certain awkwardness.  But still Shere Ali did not notice.

“And what was the exception?” he asked eagerly.  “What was the other brave deed you have seen fit to rank with this?”

“That, too, happened over there,” said the Doctor, seizing upon the question with relief.  “During the early days of the siege we were able to send in to the tower water and food.  But when the first of August came we could help them no more.  The enemy thronged too closely round us, we were attacked by night and by day, and stone sangars, in which the Swatis lay after dark, were built between us and the tower.  We sent up water to the tower for the last time at half-past nine on a Saturday morning, and it was not until half-past four on the Monday afternoon that the relieving force marched across the bridge down there and set us free.”