with hail--on a
stricken camp--dead animals--dead men. We who had swept down from
the hills like the very spirit of the storm itself returned like a
funeral cortege, all groaning, chilled to the bone by the searching
wind, and it was beginning to be dawn when the last man dragged
himself between the boulders into our camping ground. We looked so
little like victors that the Syrians sent up a wail and Tugendheim
began tugging at his mustaches, but Ranjoor Singh set them at once
to feeding and grooming animals and soon disillusioned them as to
the outcome of the night.

Now we began to pray for time, to recover from the effects of hail
and chill. Some of the men began to develop fevers, and if Ranjoor
Singh had not fiercely threatened the doctor, things might have gone
from bad to worse. As it was, three men died of something the matter
with their lungs, and five men died of wounds. Yet, on the other
hand, we did not desire too much time, because (surest of all
certainties) the Turks were going to send regiments in a hurry to
wreak vengeance. Before noon, somebody rallied the remnants of the
convoy we had beaten and brought them back to bury dead and look for
property, and they looked quite a formidable body as I watched them
from between the boulders. They soon went away again, having found
nothing but tents torn to rags; but I counted more than four
hundred, which rather lessened my conceit. It had been the storm
that night that did the work, not we.

We could not burn our dead, for lack of sufficient wood, although we
drove the Syrians out of camp to gather more; so we buried them in a
trench, and covered them, and laid little fires at intervals along
the new-stamped earth and set light to those. We did not bury them
very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to
excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when
the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave to defeat
jackals.

The Kurdish chief returned on the fifth day and by that time,
although most of us still ached, some of us looked like men again,
and what with the plunder we had taken, and the chests of gold in
full view, he was well impressed. He began by demanding the gold at
once, and Ranjoor Singh surprised me by the calm courtesy with which
he refused.

"Why should my brother seek to alter the terms of our bargain?" he
asked.

For a long time the Kurd made no answer, but sat thinking for some
excuse that