He managed to direct the team, and for a few hours it occupied his mind. Waller ploughing!--Waller, the crack man, the pattern officer, the best round-dancer in the Cornish Light Infantry--he felt the situation to be intensely ludicrous, and he could have laughed but for the circumstances the situation represented--and the dreadful doubt that hung over the fate of Mabel, of Rose, and others; and frequently he paused and looked wistfully towards the hills, as he thought that, but for yonder old Mohammedan beast, with his cocked matchlock, he should make a clean pair of heels and be off. Anyway, through his ignorance of the task in hand, and the pre-occupation of his thoughts, Bob's furrows had all the curved line of beauty, and would have made a Scottish ploughman, so vain of his straight lines, faint on the spot. So the fifth day passed and he had but one thought, the yearning to see Mabel, with the haunting terror of all she might be enduring, and that he might never see her more! Learning by chance that he was to be secured to the plough by an iron chain the next day, he determined that, come what might, he should escape in the night. Unarmed, he had but his courage and strategy to rely upon, in a country where all men's hands were against the European, where the laws have little force, and where whatever morality there is among the people, it depends entirely upon their religious sentiments and their attachment to their khans or chiefs. Two hundred years ago, an Englishman might have found himself in pretty much the same predicament in some parts of the Scottish Highlands. On examining the chimney of the apartment in which he was confined, he found that although the barred windows defied egress and ingress alike, he might achieve a passage to the external air by removing the bricks of unburnt clay, of which the wall was composed. He proceeded to pick out the lime with a nail softly, after darkness had set in, and after removing one, the cold night breeze from the Khyber hills blew gratefully upon his flushed face. Another and another were speedily removed now, and in less than half an hour--during which he frequently paused with a palpitating heart, lest he might make some unlucky sound or be discovered by old Lai--he had achieved an aperture wide enough by which to creep out. He did so, and drew a long breath, as if he respired more freely now. All was still, and the darkness was profound as the silence, and a prayer of thankfulness rose to the lips of Waller, as he quitted the compound around the farmer's establishment and hastened towards the hills, with the full knowledge that in whatever direction he went, some hours must elapse before his flight could be discovered, and there was no snow by which to track his footsteps. CHAPTER XXII. CHANCE BETTER THAN DESIGN.