; at other times it receives an indelible stain if at some
public function he is given a seat below some rival chief.

The vendetta, or blood-feud, has eaten into the very core of Afghan
life, and the nation can never become healthily progressive till public
opinion on the question of revenge alters. At present some of the best
and noblest families in Afghanistan are on the verge of extermination
through this wretched system. Even the women are not exempt. In 1905,
at Bannu, there was a case where a man had been foully murdered over
some disputed land. It was generally known who the murderer was, but
as he and his relations were powerful and likely to stick at nothing,
and the murdered man had no near relation except one sister, no one
was willing to risk his own skin in giving evidence, so when the case
came up in court the Judge was powerless to convict.

"Am I to have no justice at the hands of the Sarkar?" passionately
cried the sister in her despair. "Bring me witnesses, and I will
convict," was all the Judge could reply. "Very well; I must find my own
way;" and the girl left the court to take no rest till her brother's
blood, which was crying to her from the ground, should be avenged.

Shortly after this I was sitting in a classroom of the mission
school teaching the boys. It was a Friday morning, when thousands
of the hillmen come in to the weekly fair, and the bazaars are
full of a shouting, jostling throng, the murmur of which reaches
even the schoolroom. Suddenly a shot was heard, and then a confused
shouting. Running out on to the street hard by, I found a Wazir, quite
dead, shot through the heart. It was the murderer who had escaped the
justice of the law, but not the hand of the avenger, for the sister
had concealed a revolver on her person, and coming up to her enemy in
the crowded bazaar, had shot him point-blank. She was arrested there
and then, and the court condemned her to penal servitude for life. I
met her some weeks later as she was on the march with some other
prisoners to their destination in the Andaman Islands. Resignation and
satisfaction were her dominant feelings. "I have avenged my brother;
for the rest, it is God's will: I am content." Those were the words
in which she answered my inquiries.

The officer who has most power with the Pathans is the one who,
while transparently just, yet deals with them with a strong hand,
whose courage is beyond question, and who, when once his mind is ma