"Da'us!" cried Muhammad like a covey of partridges, and the Militia swept down the valley. Five minutes later O'Hara was gazing at the bodies. He picked up 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. 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 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. 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. Year by year the tomb gains a yard in length, and the legend connected with it be more miraculous. It 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 JOHNSON. a 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." “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, Twenty-fourth in a family of and unskilled in dissimulation, twenty-nine children, and one so that whether he loved of triplets at that, so does man or hated him 'twas equally Thomas announce himself to plain most lively in conver- the world. In that age of sation, ever ready to serve a horoscopes and "houses of friend, but a good hater." The the planets it was a common gentle reader will at once con- thing for the aspirant to fame jecture this to be an apprecia- to endeavour to prove himself tion of the sage of Fleet Street something of a "wonder-child " by some unknown Boswell: as a first step to reputation; and the gentle reader will be and we may suspect something wrong. It is indeed a portrait of the kind here. The actual of a "Great Cham of Litera- number of children is perhaps ture," and drawn by a chatty striking, but after all nothing little Boswell of his day; but in comparison with the seventy this Cham was one who de- of a maternal kinsman of rived his origin from a land Dempster's own. No, where which his great successor was he makes his mistake is in assurwont to treat with elephantine ing us that on the death of his pleasantry. For this is Thomas eldest brother he became the Dempster, Scot and universal heir. Where were the twentyscholar, of the time of James two intermediates? Had they the Sixth and First. A strange all complaisantly predeceased figure, indeed, he presents to us, the eldest? The fact is, that marvellously like that of the little reliance can be placed lexicographer, rolling his huge upon this part of his story: bulk aggressively about the what he wants to do is to world's stage, cheerful and prove that he was a professor dictatorial. But Dempster's at Paris before he was sevenFleet Street was the whole teen, and he probably postlearned continent of Europe, dates his birth some years in and his instruments of warfare order to do this. He makes were not folio Bibles wherewith somewhat of a call upon our to floor impertinent booksellers, credulity. There was, indeed, a well-authenticated John took to himself Isabella Gordon Henderson, who about 1750 of Achavach, of a family at was "professor of classics at a feud with his wife's relatives, college in South Wales at the and was more or less rightly age of twelve"; but Wales has served when his eldest son ever been prolific in precocious James, following the example genius. For the rest, Thomas's of Oriental rebels, married the account of his family seems lady, who was a witch to boot, accurate. His paternal grand- if we may believe Thomas. mother was daughter of a Then as the pro-rex rode one Stewart Earl of Buchan, and evening "to arrange the affairs his mother's mother was sister of his province," accompanied, of Lord Forbes and of Arthur quite unnecessarily as it would of that ilk, who, according to seem, by Leslies, Sinclairs, and his grand-nephew, painted the Ogilvies, the Gordons, with the country "on this side of Esk" a unnatural James at their head, brilliant scarlet by his contests fell upon them. It seems very with the Gordons - probably like a pitched battle between over church lands. families; and that the king himself, as Dempster reminds him, had to interfere "in deadly fashion" renders this more probable. In any case there was a very pretty little bickering, resulting in the death of the irenarch and several more. But the particulars are marred by Dempster's assertion that his father received seven bullets in one leg (at a time when such missiles weighed about 28 to the pound), and had his head cleft with a scimitar. Sore-headed and sore-hearted at such a parricidal assault, the injured sire avenged himself by selling his lands of Muiresk to the Earl of Errol, who, "because the vendor could neither pay nor find securities"-things commonly sup posed to be the business of the purchaser -"kept both estate and price to this day." Owing to this curious transaction Thomas inherited only an empty dignity, which, how Dempster was indeed born and bred in an atmosphere of brawls. His progenitor, like Henry the Fifth's, was "thinking of civil wars," and there fore was he "created with a stubborn outside, with an aspect of iron." His father, "baron" of Muiresk, Auchterless, and Killesmont, married to Jean Leslie, sister of the "irenarch" of Aberdeen, was, he tells us, "viceroy" of Banff and Buchan: what these strange titles mean it is difficult to ascertain-in a certain sense a policeman is a "prorex," but as Dempster uses them glibly enough in the dedication of one of his works to King James, the last man in the world to overlook an inaccuracy, we may assume that they had a meaning.1 The viceroy was not happy in his family relations: not content with Jean Leslie and her twenty-nine children, he 1 As Leslie was actually Sheriff of Aberdeen, it may be that "irenarcha" is used by Dempster to signify that office instead of the usual term "vice-comes." ever, he paraded on every titlepage of his books-baron of Muiresk and a claim which he prosecuted fitfully for many years, being, as he says, much handicapped by his steadfast adhesion to Romanism: but whether he was born in that faith or adopted it later in life he nowhere vouchsafes to tell us. As to the parricidal brother, his career was lurid. He turned pirate, burned the Bishop of Orkney out of house and home, and after repudiating his "impure Medea" of a wife, betook himself to the lowlands of Holland, the refuge at that time of such wastrels, entered some army or other, and for having assaulted his colonel was torn in pieces by wild horses. The cup of poetic justice is filled up by the fate of Medea, for whom an entirely new disease was devised, of which she died in torment, seven children and all. From these family jars Thomas was fortunately removed. Feuds with Currers and the Grants had long before rendered the paternal roof no safe shelter for a child, and at the age of three he was sent to rusticate with relatives in the country. There he says he learned all the elements (apparently the alphabet) in a single hour, and was then sent to school at Turriff, where for a while he groaned under the lash of furious martinet named Ogston, no doubt a forbear of the suffragette "Lady Lady with the whip," and then received some real instruction from a well-known schoolmaster, Thomas Cargill of Aberdeen. Still maintaining his reputation as a "wonderchild," he proceeded to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, at the age of ten. In comparison with this, Wolsey's graduation at fifteen seems a poor thing. But at Cambridge Dempster made no long stay: it is possible that the conversion of the child was one of the trophies of the Romanist propaganda there at all events, from henceforth he appears as a zealous adherent of the Roman Church, and to study under that Church's auspices he now betook himself, with a tutor, to France. Landing at Calais, he fell among thieves, lost his tutor by death, and all his possessions at the hands of marauding French soldiers. Thus stripped and destitute, he made his way to Montreux, where he was succoured by Walter Bruce, a Scot in the French service, and forwarded on to Paris, where other kindly compatriots helped him to begin his studies. Almost immediately he fell a victim to one of the maladies which were endemic in the squalid colleges of the University, and though his powerful physique enabled him to throw off the disease, he very sensibly changed his quarters, and made his way through lands impartially devastated by French and Spanish troops to Louvain, where the great Justus Lipsius was illuminating the University. If Dempster heard him, it was not for long: he was presently selected by William Crichton, Principal of the Scots College, as one of four promising youths who were to be sent to Rome to study under |