"Get under cover, lads, as best you may!" cried he, as his bugler sounded to "commence firing;" and with a dark, stern, and desperate expression in their hungry faces, his soldiers knelt behind rocks and stones, dead horses and camels, dhooleys and abandoned baggage-boxes, and proceeded to return the fire of the Afghans (about a hundred in number), who were taking quiet pot-shots at any head that appeared above the snow-clad rocks, behind which they were lurking. Now and then a fiend-like yell, and pair of brown booted feet, or swarthy dark hands appearing wildly in the air, announced when an English bullet found its billet in a Mussulman body; and then the soldiers smiled grimly to each other, as they thought "there is one the less in the world, at all events." This serious musketry practice, and the wailing of women and children, were the only morning _reveillé_ in that melancholy halting place on the bank of the Loghur. CHAPTER XIX. THE SKIRMISH. Gratitude to General Trecarrel, who had been kind to his dead mother, to Sybil, and ever so to himself, with a natural regard for the old soldier as the father of Rose, made Denzil linger near him, and beseech him to retire and not to expose his life needlessly. Absorbed in his great grief the General made no reply; with his face pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his teeth set, he sat on horseback and watched the turns of the skirmish. The juzailchees fired with deadly aim as they levelled their long weapons over rests, or the rocks behind which they were crouching; thus some ten or twelve of Waller's skirmishers had fallen; of these five were dead, and others were creeping wounded to the halting-place, which some of them were not destined to reach, as they died of exhaustion, loss of blood, or another bullet by the way. His company continued to advance steadily by front and rear-rank files alternately, each man darting forward and getting under the cover of some rock or _bedana_ (as the wild mulberry bushes are named), till they were all within half musket shot of the foe. The reports of the firing were reverberated among the snow-clad cliffs, tossed from peak to peak, and so often repeated, that it seemed as if four times the number of men were engaged; but though each soldier had forty rounds of ammunition when leaving the Cantonments, cartridges were failing already, for their stiffened and frost-bitten fingers dropped more than they discharged, so that the living had soon to supply themselves from the pouches of the dead. Suddenly a cry of pain escaped General Trecarrel, and he fell heavily from his horse, which swerved madly round, and fled into the Pass, with saddle reversed and bridle trailing. An exclamation of mingled rage and commiseration left the lips of Waller, who glanced back hastily in the humane hope that Mabel did not see this calamity, of which, however, she was so soon to hear.