For in one or two instances, despite the piteous entreaties of the ladies, some soldiers--those very men whom the 13th had subscribed their rupees at the drum-head to ransom--whose weakness from wounds or bodily illness rendered them incapable of riding or marching were shot by the wayside, and left unburied, even as so many lamed horses or diseased dogs which were useless might have been. One or two, who were weary of life, entreated to have it ended thus, and all whom the Dooranees destroyed thus in obedience to Ackbar's orders and the grim law, perhaps, of necessity, died peacefully and piously--sick of their present existence, and hopeful of the future; but the women screamed, lamented, and prayed, seeking to muffle their ears when the death-shots rang in the mountain wilderness. Mabel Trecarrel was weak and ailing too, but she was much too valuable a species of commodity to be shot out of hand, like a poor Feringhee soldier, even though quite as much a Kaffir and infidel as he might be; so she was tenderly borne in a palanquin which had been found in the cantonments, and which contained every comfort and appliance for travelling--little drawers for holding clothes or food, and even a mirror, though she never looked at it. Like a few more, she was silent in her grief, and found a refuge in tears. The wedded wife might utter loudly and despairingly the name of her husband, and the parent that of the dead or absent child, finding a relief for the overcharged heart in sound; but, even in that terrible time, the poor betrothed girl could only whisper, in the inmost recesses of her breast, of the lover she never more might see, and gaze backward with haggard eyes on the features of the landscape with which they had both become familiar--the hills of Beymaru, the ridges of the Black Rocks, and the smiling valley of Cabul, as they all lessened and faded away in the distance, while slowly but surely, under a watchful and most unscrupulous guard, the train of prisoners, on active Tartar horses or plodding Afghan yaboos, in swinging dhooleys and curtained litters of other kinds, wound among the mountains on their way to Toorkistan, the frontiers of which were only about a week's journey distant. And what was the prospect before them? Separation and distribution, to be bartered for horses, or sold into slavery and degradation; the few men among them, irrespective of rank, to be the bondsmen, syces, carpet-spreaders, and grooms, hewers of wood and drawers of water: the women, if young, to be the veriest slaves of ignorant and unlettered masters, as yet unseen and unknown; if old, to become nurses and drudges to the women of the Usbec Tartars: and all these were Christians, and civilised subjects of the Queen; many of them accomplished, highly bred, nobly born, and tenderly nurtured. Terrible were the emotions of the English mother, who, circumstanced thus, looked on her pure and innocent daughters and thought of what a week might bring forth!