Anyway, the day we left Aksu (he had drawn the balance of his pay the day before under the pretext of remitting it home through some Indian money-lenders who had cashed cheques for us) he just was not. Wrexham rode back to Aksu to see if he could be found, but failed to discover any traces of him. The man had just vanished. Doubtless he had joined some passing caravan or else hidden with some acquaintance in Aksu. This put us in rather a quandary, for we did not relish the idea of living for the future on purely native food. And that was the point where we first realized the extraordinary value of that Admirable Crichton, Firoz Khan, Punjabi Mohammedan, of the Salt Range, ex-sapper and miner and devoted slave of Wrexham. He had served on three fronts, finally cutting his name, to follow Wrexham as body-servant and orderly and general master of the household to Central Asia in 1919. Possibly in India pride of race would have prevented him offering his services, but here in the wastes of Kashgaria, among a people who know not caste, the old Hindu traditions which tend to hamper the Mussulman in India fell from him completely. We were rather despondently making our evening meal off tinned stuffs requiring no cooking which Payindah Khan, my ex-sepoy orderly and present body-servant, had laid out for us. Payindah had learnt the art of waiting at table in East Africa, when most of our Indian servants had faded away into hospital. When I sent in my papers Payindah had demanded to be taken along wherever I was going, to superintend my “household,” as he called my odd servants and grooms. Wounded in France, again in East Africa, again in Palestine, the last time pretty badly, he was a Punjabi Mussulman of the old type pre-war soldier. Uneducated yeoman farmer, whose knowledge of letters amounted to a painful slow scrawl which purported to be his signature, and a rapid and accurate but utterly incomprehensible method of doing accounts which saved me a good deal monthly on the bills my following produced, he was gifted with a quick mother-wit and a shrewd skill in judging men that was worth all the cheap board-school type of education that we are trying to thrust on unwilling India at the request of the babu politician. He was a childless man, wifeless, too, since the ’flu year, and for some reason had not married again. I asked him one day who was going to inherit his land in Salt Range if he didn’t marry, and he told me that his nephew, a fine strapping lad who had been in my company during the war, would take it on, and there were two smaller editions at home waiting to get big enough to join the regiment and let the nephew go back to their land.