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 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 a few of the 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 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.