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yards he ran, thirty, forty, fifty, and still no sign. Then three shots rang out in quick succession, and the flying figure turned abruptly to the left, ran a few paces in a semicircle, blundered straight against a rock, and collapsed into a formless heap.

"Pidar sukhtah!" (Son of a burnt father) exclaimed Haider, who recognised the sign, "he is shot through the heart for certain. He has destroyed himself by his goat-heartedness [cowardice] and me also."

And yet was it cowardice that brought the Clerk to his death? Was it not rather the result of his upbringing in the civilised environment of Delhi, where words were everything and acts nothing, where abstract notions of rights and liberties were eagerly assimilated and the corresponding obligations, moral and physical, neglected? It is not to be wondered at that, suddenly put to the touchstone of action, the Clerk failed, failed as disastrously as the Subedar would have done, with his belief in cold iron as the solvent of life's problems, had he been put to the test in the Clerk's native environment.

The Subedar's position was indeed desperate. There was no possibility of extricating himself from the trap he was in, and the only chance of life lay in being able to defend himself under cover of the rocks until relieved by his own party, who would march to the sound of firing, if it was heard. But the chance was faint.

VOL. CLXXXVI.—NO. MCXXX.

In the meantime the raiders seemed in no hurry to begin the fight, and Haider guessed that they had not yet located him. The minutes passed and time was in Haider's favour. Haider wound his shoulder-cloth tightly round his loins, and removed some cartridges from his bandolier, laying them ready to his hand.

Presently it began. From a spur on the other side of the narrow valley rose a puff of smoke, and a bullet struck the ground a few yards above Haider, showing that his position had become known. Haider was fairly sheltered by the rocks from the firing across the valley, and the distance was too great for accurate shooting. What he had to fear was an attack under cover of the rocks below him, and the possibility of some of the raiders working round to the hillside behind him, but to do that they would have to cross the open where the Clerk's body lay.

Something slate-grey moved in the rocks below, and Haider's rifle rang out for the first time, and the crisp report of the LeeEnfield was at once recognised by the raiders. They were still cautious, for Haider might have others concealed with him.

In the meantime the fire from the other side of the valley increased, and the rocks sheltering the Subedar were fairly splattered with with lead. This betokened an advance from the rocks below him, and Haider redoubled his vigilance in that direction. One man

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had crept to the shelter of a rock one hundred yards from him, and another ran across a piece of open ground and dropped behind the same cover. Haider got in a shot as he ran, but quick shooting is difficult lying down, and Haider missed him. A third tried the crossing, but he fell, either killed or wounded, as he started.

For the time, then, it became a duel between Haider and the two men behind the advanced rock, with the men on the opposite side of the valley covering their attack and confusing Haider's aim. Full forty rifles were concentrated on him, but Haider was fairly confident as long as the attack was confined to those two sides. Of the two men in front of him, one had to fire round the left side of the rock, and to do so had to expose himself, while his fellow firing round the right side was fairly covered. Haider devoted his attention to the former, and was shortly rewarded by a clear shot at the shoulder. The man lurched forward and lay partly clear of the rock, but as he was pulled under cover by his comrade three men dashed simultaneously across the open and gained the shelter of the rock, and Haider, who was intent on trying to discover the effect of his shot, missed the opportunity of stopping them.

It would now seem that a rush by numbers would settle the matter. That is not the custom of the tribesmen, who would much rather plant a knife between the shoulder

blades of a defenceless man than attack him, however superior in numbers, in the open. And it is not through any lack of courage: the former method is considered artistic, the other mere brutal bungling.

So now 8 pause ensued, broken only by desultory firing from across the valley, and Haider guessed some fresh manoeuvre was hatching. Suddenly a rush was made from the rocks below, and the Subedar in his effort to stop it exposed himself. Evidently a marksman had joined the party on the spur opposite, for a bullet caught Haider on the outside of the right thigh, broke the bone, and cut the artery. Haider knew that his end had come, but all was not over yet. Wrapping his bandolier twice round his thigh, he pulled it as tight as he could with the buckle, and then exposed himself recklessly to shoot at the men in the rocks below. Life and strength were ebbing from him, but he managed to drag himself against the rock for support. The bullets which had rained on the rocks round Haider suddenly ceased, for Haider, intent on the rocks below him, had neglected to watch his flank. He heard his name called close behind him, and turned painfully to find himself looking down the barrel of a rifle. Muhammad Jan, the cattle - thief, had crawled unnoticed to a rock not five yards behind the Subedar, and was now covering him with a rifle.

"Da'us!" cried Muhammad like a covey of partridges, and

Jan, “your end has come to you," and with that he pressed the trigger. A dull click was heard as the striker struck the cap of the cartridge, but no explosion followed. Involuntarily Muhammad Jan looked in astonishment at the bolt of his rifle, and took his eyes off Haider. For a moment the cattle-thief was off his guard, but that moment was enough for the Subedar. With a last effort Haider swung his rifle up, and a bullet crashed through the cattle-thief's brain. Help was near Haider, but Haider was past caring; slowly he drew out a knife and opened it. Dragging his rifle towards him he cut once, sidewise and deep, into the polished stock; then his strength failed, and rifle and knife clattered from his grasp. With his last breath Subedar Haider spoke the Muhammadan viaticum: "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet."

O'Hara had found the body of the postal runner bound up in telegraph wire and brutally murdered, and had met the Dozak party from whom he learnt the direction the Subedar had taken. With the combined force he hurried in pursuit of the raiders. He was not far off when the fight began, and made at once to the sound of the firing. O'Hara and his men topped the pass at the head of the valley as the Subedar's rifle rang out for the last time, and the raiders, taken in the rear, scattered over the hills

the Militia swept down the valley. Five minutes later O'Hara was gazing at the bodies. He picked up Haider's rifle and the knife, and noticed the fresh cut on the stock. His eye travelled from the rifle to Muhammad Jan's body, and he understood. A nick of wood flew from the stock as O'Hara made a stroke with the knife, and the twenty-seventh notch stood out raw and clean beside the others.

Meanwhile Havildar Hussein Ali, who had watched O'Hara's actions with approval, picked up the cattle-thief's rifle and jerked open the breech, throwing out the unfired cartridge.

"Look, Sahib," he exclaimed to O'Hara, "here is a strange thing! The striker has hit the cap true enough, yet the cartridge was not fired. It is Government ammunition, too, which the Subedar sent as a present to yonder son of a dog. The powder must be wet."

Saying this Hussein Ali screwed out the bullet and poured the contents of the case into his hand.

"Allah Akbar" (God is the Great One), he cried, "this is a miracle! the powder has been changed to earth." The men crowded round to see the marvel, but O'Hara, who knew of the Subedar's gift to Muhammad Jan, kept his conjectures to himself.

Subedar Haider and Abdul Aziz, the telegraph clerk, lie buried side by side at the Dozak Post, and the Government of India has written their

epitaph in a despatch which, while deploring the loss of two valuable servants killed in the execution of their duty, and sanctioning a pension to the family of the Clerk, was careful to point out that the Subedar's family was entitled to nothing at all: he was merely an officer of the local militia, so that his case came neither within the provisions of the Civil Service regulations nor those of the regular Army.

The Militia Mullah arrived at a different conclusion as to the respective merits of the two. From the miraculous circumstances attending Haider's death, it was obvious that the Subedar was a Shahid (a Martyr), and his tomb is already an object of veneration.

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Year by year the tomb gains a yard in length, and the legend connected with it becomes more miraculous. has already absorbed the adjacent tomb of the Clerk, of which no trace remains, and Haider is within measurable distance of becoming a saint, and his tomb a ziarat (shrine).

As for the pension, did not Haider's son, aged fifteen, return home from an interview with O'Hara carrying a rifle with twenty-seven notches on the stock wherewith to carry on the family feuds and traditions, and is not the possession of one Government Lee-Enfield rifle worth the fattest of pensions to an honest family across the Border?

"MILITIAMAN."

A SCOTTISH

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"A MAN remarkable in body and in mind, of a stature above the ordinary; his head large and his deportment royal; unwearied in study, and passing fourteen hours a day (as he told me) in reading; distinguished for acuteness but still more for memory, so that he said at times he knew not what it was to forget. Rugged in manner he was, but open, and unskilled in dissimulation, so that whether he loved man or hated him 'twas equally plain most lively in conversation, ever ready to serve a friend, but a good hater." The gentle reader will at once conjecture this to be an appreciation of the sage of Fleet Street by some unknown Boswell: and the gentle reader will be wrong. It is indeed a portrait of a "Great Cham of Literature," and drawn by a chatty little Boswell of his day; but this Cham was one who derived his origin from a land which his great successor was wont to treat with elephantine pleasantry. For this is Thomas Dempster, Scot and universal scholar, of the time of James the Sixth and First. A strange figure, indeed, he presents to us, marvellously like that of the lexicographer, rolling his huge bulk aggressively about the world's stage, cheerful and dictatorial. But Dempster's Fleet Street was the whole learned continent of Europe, and his instruments of warfare were not folio Bibles wherewith to floor impertinent booksellers,

JOHNSON.

but weapons more lethal. Not a day did he allow to pass, says his biographer with proper pride, without an affray, either with swords or, if no swords were handy, then fists. And so it was that as Johnson was the terror of overweening publishers, so Dempster became "formidable to all pedagogues."

Twenty-fourth in a family of twenty-nine children, and one of triplets at that, so does Thomas announce himself to the world. In that age of horoscopes and "houses" of the planets it was a common thing for the aspirant to fame to endeavour to prove himself something of a "wonder-child" as a first step to reputation; and we may suspect something of the kind here. The actual number of children is perhaps striking, but after all nothing in comparison with the seventy of a maternal kinsman of Dempster's own. No, where he makes his mistake is in assuring us that on the death of his eldest brother he became the heir. Where were the twentytwo intermediates? Had they all complaisantly predeceased the eldest? The fact is, that little reliance can be placed upon this part of his story: what he wants to do is to prove that he was a professor at Paris before he was seventeen, and he probably postdates his birth some years in order to do this. He makes somewhat of a call upon our credulity. There was, indeed,

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