Hafiz Ullah answered in a very loud voice, ’Mine was guiltless.  Hear, ye Men of the Night, neither my father nor my blood had any part in that sin.  Bear thou thy own punishment, Shahbaz Khan.’

’Oh, some one ought to stop those two chaps crowing away like cocks there,’ said Lieutenant Halley, shivering under his rock.

He had hardly turned round to expose a new side of him to the rain before a bearded, long-locked, evil-smelling Afghan rushed up the hill, and tumbled into his arms.  Halley sat upon him, and thrust as much of a sword-hilt as could be spared down the man’s gullet.  ’If you cry out, I kill you,’ he said cheerfully.

The man was beyond any expression of terror.  He lay and quaked, grunting.  When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley’s arm, feeling it from elbow to wrist.

‘The Rissala!  The dead Rissala!’ he gasped.  ‘It is down there!’

‘No; the Rissala, the very much alive Rissala.  It is up here,’ said Halley, unshipping his watering-bridle, and fastening the man’s hands.  ‘Why were you in the towers so foolish as to let us pass?’

‘The valley is full of the dead,’ said the Afghan.  ’It is better to fall into the hands of the English than the hands of the dead.  They march to and fro below there.  I saw them in the lightning.’

He recovered his composure after a little, and whispering, because Halley’s pistol was at his stomach, said:  ’What is this?  There is no war between us now, and the Mullah will kill me for not seeing you pass!’

‘Rest easy,’ said Halley; ’we are coming to kill the Mullah, if God please.  His teeth have grown too long.  No harm will come to thee unless the daylight shows thee as a face which is desired by the gallows for crime done.  But what of the dead regiment?’

‘I only kill within my own border,’ said the man, immensely relieved.  ’The Dead Regiment is below.  The men must have passed through it on their journey—­four hundred dead on horses, stumbling among their own graves, among the little heaps—­dead men all, whom we slew.’

‘Whew!’ said Halley.  ’That accounts for my cursing Carter and the Major cursing me.  Four hundred sabres, eh?  No wonder we thought there were a few extra men in the troop.  Kurruk Shah,’ he whispered to a grizzled native officer that lay within a few feet of him, ’hast thou heard anything of a dead Rissala in these hills?’

‘Assuredly,’ said Kurruk Shah with a grim chuckle.  ’Otherwise, why did I, who have served the Queen for seven-and-twenty years, and killed many hill-dogs, shout aloud for quarter when the lightning revealed us to the watch-towers?  When I was a young man I saw the killing in the valley of Sheor-Kot there at our feet, and I know the tale that grew up therefrom.  But how can the ghosts of unbelievers prevail against us who are of the Faith?  Strap that dog’s hands a little tighter, Sahib.  An Afghan is like an eel.’