After two hours more fighting--hours that added to the heaps of dead and dying below the Bala Hissar walls, and to the fearful casualties in the ranks of the small band fighting for existence within the Residency--Lieutenant Hamilton sent out Taimar, the guide, with an open letter promising the Ameer's mutineers six months' pay if they dispersed. Courageous Taimar, clad in his uniform as a guide-soldier--drab, laced, piped, and faced with scarlet--went among them, but he was not listened to. The letter was torn to shreds; his uniform was rent off him; he was robbed of all he had, severely beaten, and tossed into a vault, where he lay insensible till he made his escape under cloud of night; and that he was not slain outright was simply due to his Usbeg blood and features. And eventually he reached our outpost at Lundi-Khani Kotal in the Kurram Valley. After his return to the Residency, amid the confusion and defence of so many points of the roof on which the whole of its slender garrison were now gathered, Robert Wodrow for a time was unable to discover Colville, and feared that he had fallen. After a little time he discovered him on the summit of an isolated tower, where, with four men, he had taken post to enfilade the fire of the mutineers; but his four soldiers were all shot down in quick succession. Wodrow saw him turn them on their faces, take the ammunition from their pouches, and proceed single-handed to defend with a musket the tower which was now in flames, and was ere long enveloped in smoke. When a puff of wind blew the latter aside for a moment a cry escaped Robert Wodrow, for Colville had vanished, and in a few minutes after, the tower fell thundering down in a mass of blazing ruins. The assailants had now discovered that loftier buildings, as stated, commanded the flat roof of the Residency, the upper storey of which was open on every side, being merely a sleeping place during the hot months of the year, and consisting of a roof, wattled and plastered, resting on slender pillars of wood, painted and gaily gilded. Thus the insurgents were enabled by a fire, chiefly directed from the loftier windows and roof of the arsenal, to drive the desperate and now despairing defenders downward from floor to floor, till they ultimately reached the last, upon the ground; and there, for no less than four hours more, they made a noble and heroic resistance against the fanatical and furious multitude which hurled its strength against them, so close at times that the young officers of Cavagnari's suite were seen to fire their pistols right into the mouths and eyes of their savage assailants.