. Then there
was an oath, a shower of blue sparks as shod hooves crashed on small
stones, and a man rolled over with a jangle of accoutrements that
would have waked the dead.

'Now we've gone and done it,' said Lieutenant Halley. 'All the
hillside awake, and all the hillside to climb in the face of
musketry-fire. This comes of trying to do night-hawk work.'

The trembling trooper picked himself up, and tried to explain that
his horse had fallen over one of the little cairns that are built of
loose stones on the spot where a man has been murdered. There was no
need for reasons. The Major's big Australian charger blundered next,
and the column came to a halt in what seemed to be a very graveyard
of little cairns all about two feet high. The man[oe]uvres of the
squadron are not reported. Men said that it felt like mounted
quadrilles without training and without the music; but at last the
horses, breaking rank and choosing their own way, walked clear of
the cairns, till every man of the squadron re-formed and drew rein a
few yards up the slope of the hill. Then, according to Lieutenant
Halley, there was another scene very like the one which has been
described. The Major and Carter insisted that all the men had not
joined rank, and that there were more of them in the rear clicking
and blundering among the dead men's cairns. Lieutenant Halley told
off his own troopers again and resigned himself to wait. Later on he
told me:--

'I didn't much know, and I didn't much care what was going on. The
row of that trooper falling ought to have scared half the country,
and I would take my oath that we were being stalked by a full
regiment in the rear, and _they_ were making row enough to rouse all
Afghanistan. I sat tight, but nothing happened.'

The mysterious part of the night's work was the silence on the
hillside. Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost
huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected by the
time that the Major had sworn himself into a state of quiet that the
watchmen there would open fire. When nothing occurred, they said that
the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and
thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (a) that he
had left no one behind among the cairns, and (b) that he was not
being taken in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The
men's tempers were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were lathered and
unquiet, and one and all