I?  My share of it?  A Turkish soldier tried to drive a bayonet through me.  I think he was the last one left in camp (the whole business can only have lasted three or four minutes, once we were among them).  I shot him with the repeating pistol that had once been Tugendheim’s—­this one, see, sahib—­and believing the camp was now ours and the fighting over, I lay down and dragged his body over me to save me from hailstones, that had made me ache already in every inch of my body.  I rolled under and pulled the body over in one movement; and seeing the body and thinking a Turk was crawling up to attack him, one of our troopers thrust his bayonet clean through it.  It was a goodly thrust, delivered by a man who prided himself on being workmanlike.  If the Turk had not been a fat one I should not be here.  Luckily, I had chosen one whose weight made me grunt, and because of his thickness the bayonet only pierced an inch or two of my thigh.

I yelled and kicked the body off me.  The trooper made as if to use the steel again, thinking we were two Turks, and my pointing a pistol at him only served to confirm the belief.  But next minute the lightning showed the true facts, and he came and sat beside me with his back to the hail, grinning like an ape.

“That was a good thrust of mine!” he bellowed in my ear.  “But for me that Turk would have had your life!”

When I had cursed his mother’s ancestors for a dozen generations in some detail the truth dawned on him at last.  I took his weapon away from him while he bound a strip of cloth about my thigh, for I knew the thought had come into his thick skull to finish me off and so save explanation afterward.  I would gladly have let him go with nothing further said, for I knew the man’s first intention had been honest enough, but did not dare do that because he would certainly suppose me to be meditating vengeance.  So I flew into a great rage with him, and drove him in front of me until we found a dead mule—­ whether killed by hail or bullet I don’t know—­and he and I lay between the mule’s legs, snuggling under its belly, until the storm should cease and I could take him before Ranjoor Singh.

I did not know where the gold was, nor where anything or anybody was.  I could see about three yards, except when the lightning flashed; and then I could see only stricken plain, with dead animals lying about, and fallen tents lumpy with the men who huddled underneath, and here and there a live animal with his rump to the hail and head between his forelegs.

When the storm ceased, suddenly, as all such mountain hail-storms do, I ordered my trooper in front of me and went limping through the darkness shouting for Ranjoor Singh, and I found him at last, sitting on the rump of a dead donkey with the ten boxes of gold coin beside him—­quite little boxes, yet only two to a donkey load.

“I have the gold,” he said.  “What have you?”

“A stab,” said I, “and the fool who gave it me!” And I showed my leg, with the blood trickling down.  “I had killed a Turk,” said I, “and this muddlehead with no discernment had the impudence to try to finish the job.  Behold the result!”