Morning came. There was no appearance of the party whom they had been sent to meet; so Douglas was preparing to return to Bajgah, when a heavy matchlock fire was opened on his men, from the fort and the surrounding orchards; and presently a party of Oosbeg horsemen appeared in sight, and charged down upon the little band, who met and repulsed the attack. It was a fine thing then to see the bold front which Douglas and his men showed to the enemy, as they made their way, exposed to a heavy matchlock fire, through the dense orchards and wilderness of gardens. But many fell on the retreat; and many more would have fallen, for their ammunition was well-nigh gone, had not Sturt suddenly appeared with two more companies of the same sturdy Goorkha Regiment,[50] and rescued them from inevitable destruction. The enemy turned and fled; and Sturt and Douglas returned to Bajgah. The evil tidings of this disaster soon reached Caubul. It was a time of deep anxiety. As this month of August advanced, the perplexities which distracted the mind of the envoy, gathered around him more closely and more tormentingly. A series of small but mortifying failures, of which this Bajgah affair was one, not without a significance of their own, kept him in a constant state of excitability, and left him neither rest of body nor serenity of mind. On the 12th of August he wrote to Major Rawlinson, saying, “There has been an awkward business near Bajgah, owing to the incapacity of the officer in command of the 4th or Ghoorka Regiment. He has allowed a company to lose thirty or forty men, killed and wounded, I think but little of this affair. Lord has gone off to put things to rights. Macgregor has failed also in his efforts to set matters to rights in Bajore. His invincibles have been vanquished, and he has lost a gun. All these little accidents happening at once are enough to disgust one; but, _Inshallah!_ the Company’s Nusseeb will prove superior to them all.” A week later, and it had become still more apparent that, even in the very neighbourhood of the capital, sedition was weaving plots for the subversion of the authority of the Shah; and that the Sikhs were intriguing from a distance for the restoration of Dost Mahomed. On the 19th of August, the envoy wrote to the same correspondent, that he had “intercepted a letter which, if genuine (as he had every reason to believe it to be), implicated many chiefs in meditated insurrection in favour of Dost Mahomed.” It distinctly stated too, that Nao Nahal Singh had promised pecuniary aid in furtherance of the design. “I am now just going to his Majesty,” he added, “to consult as to what should be done.” It was time, indeed, that the King and the envoy should take counsel together. Dost Mahomed had escaped from Bokhara.