We reach a sudden turn of the path; my guide gallops round it. He is hardly out of my sight when Bang! bang! It is no use pulling up, and the next instant I am round the corner too. A man, with his jezail still smoking from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden down. Another man comes running down the hillside towards him. In front of me, some fifty yards off, is my guide, with his horse's head towards me and his sword in his hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of brightly-coloured clothing--a dead Afridi! For a second both guide and I thought that it was we who had drawn the fire from the ambushed men. But no, it the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before us, and the victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close by, but his lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying there on either side of his path, had shot him as he passed. But what a group we were! Myself, with my revolver in my hand, looking, horror-stricken, now at the dead, and now at his murderers; my guide, in the splendid uniform of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as only Orientals can be; the two murderers talking together excitedly; in the middle of us the dead lad! But there was still another figure to be added, for suddenly, along the very path by which the victim had come, there came running an old woman--perhaps she had followed the lad with a mother's tender anxiety for his safety--and in an instant she saw the worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself down with the cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boys side, and as my guide turned to ride on and I followed him, as the murderers slipped away into the undergrowth, we all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body of her murdered son. II.