Almost immediately on setting out he was met by perhaps the gravest of the perils he was to encounter. Descending a rugged hill into a dry watercourse, which he hoped would afford him a measure of cover, the loose stones rolling under his feet betrayed him to the drowsy watchman of a party of the enemy, who were sleeping, wrapped in their mantles, round a smouldering fire. They were between him and the fort, and there was no hope of retreat; but as the sentry’s bullet came skipping over the rocks past him, and the sleepers, on the alert at once, sat up and grasped their weapons, Dick’s resolution was taken. With a cry of joy he rushed towards the fire and inquired eagerly and incoherently in Khemistani whether the fort had fallen and he was too late to take his part in the plundering. The party upon whom he had chanced were all good Moslems, and their rage was extreme on discovering by his dress that the intruder was a hillman, and that they had been awakened because a wretch of an idolater was trying to get a share of their booty. He was driven from their camp with blows and curses, and ordered to tell his people that any further attempt to participate in the expected spoils would be met with force of arms. The same ruse helped him again and again during the day. On sighting a part of the enemy, he had only to approach them humbly and detail what had happened to him, asking for redress, when the same fate would befall him immediately on his mentioning what his crime had been. Every chase took him farther from the fort and nearer to civilisation, and at last he fell in with a small party of hillmen, fleeing from the hated Moslems into territory which was still British, who allowed him to join himself to them. But this meeting landed him in another danger, for although he could speak the hill dialect well enough to pass muster with the lowlanders, he could not deceive those whose native tongue it was. For some time he parried questions by declaring that he belonged to a different tribe; but the hillmen grew more and more suspicious, thinking that he must be a spy from the camp of their hereditary foes. They kept a close watch on him, and he gathered that they intended to deliver him up to the first British patrol they came across. This would have suited his purpose excellently but for the extremely slow rate at which his new friends travelled, and he seized the first opportunity that offered itself of eluding their vigilance and striking off across country to the nearest fort. His late entertainers pursued him; but he reached the fort first and delivered his message, so that when the hillmen arrived they were electrified to behold him in uniform assisting in the preparations for the relief expedition. Thence his course had been, as Fitz Anstruther remarked irreverently, “a triumphal procession,” an observation which the old soldier who was acting as guide took in very good part.