When Stolietoff and his Cossacks scrambled back to the Oxus over the craggy pathway by Bamian and Balkh, L’Estrange remained in Afghanistan. It was he, when the Afghan Major courteously enough blocked the entrance of Neville Chamberlain and his mission into the Khyber Pass, who jeered at that grand old soldier as he wheeled his Arab in front of the _sungah_ behind which the Afghan picket lay with fingers on the triggers. He it was, on that gloomy day in the rough valley beyond the Sherpur cantonment, when the jezail-fire staggered the finest Lancer regiment in the British service, from whose rifle sped the bullet that wrought the long agony and final death of the gallant Cleland. Commissioned always from Russia, L’Estrange was in Joubert’s camp when poor Colley climbed the Majuba to his untimely death. Those who held that it was the futile and garrulous Aylward who gave the Boers the plan of campaign which scared Mr. Gladstone into restoring their independence, were strangely mistaken. L’Estrange prescribed the tactics which prevailed at Laing’s Neck and the Ingogo, and it was he who lured Colley to his disaster by enjoining the removal of the Boer picket which had been wont to occupy the summit of the Majuba. When Herbert Stewart was brought a prisoner into the Boer camp, L’Estrange insulted the captive man as he was being led away from his interview with the studiously courteous Joubert. With a straight one from the shoulder, learnt in the big dormitory of Winchester College, Stewart promptly grassed the renegade, who, as he rose to his feet, muttered with an evil smile that he would “bide his time.”