With a temerity that showed his desperate case, this man had his rifle and ten cartridges with him, but he made no show of resistance. The difficulty of obtaining evidence is gradually disappearing, the Kizilbash who handed the sepoy to General Hills, Military Governor of Cabul, coming forward openly and stating all that he knew. It is to these Kizilbashes that we shall have greatly to trust in examining into the details of the Massacre, as the city people are all against us. Being semi-independent, and forming a powerful section among themselves, the Kizilbashes have less to fear, than others, from any measures of revenge that may afterwards be taken against them; and if we can once get them to speak openly, our work will be greatly simplified. Of the secret combination which Kushdil Khan, Nek Mahomed, and the other influential chiefs about the Amir’s person promoted, it will be far more difficult to take up the threads; but there is still some hope of tracing the conspiracy to its source. As the investigation proceeds, and the various statements forthcoming are dove-tailed into each other, it will become plain upon whom the chief guilt is to rest. There are still several prisoners to be tried, and each day adds its little quota of evidence against the large class of “suspects.” There will no doubt be exception taken to the course Sir F. Roberts is pursuing, and political capital may be made out of it;[20] but unless the mission of the army now before Cabul is to be a failure, there is no option but to follow out to the end the lines of policy laid down. The murder of our Envoy and his escort was, as the Proclamation in the Bala Hissar of October 12th sets forth, “a treacherous and cowardly crime, which has brought indelible disgrace upon the Afghan people,” and there is but one punishment for treachery and cowardice of this kind. If daily executions are to be the rule for the next few weeks, they can only be those of isolated persons who may fall into our hands; and their death is a very small atonement for the crime in which so many participated. The city rabble is unpunished; the Herat regiments have escaped; and if we are nominally in possession of Northern Afghanistan, that possession means very little to the ruffians we have to deal with. They will pocket our rupees and thrive upon us as long as we remain; and the instant we take our departure, their arms, now hidden, will soon be furbished up again for future mischief. Apart from this view of the case—which is, of course, only taken as regards the discontented and fanatical part of the nation more nearly concerned in the events of the first week in September—there are two other considerations which have to guide us in all that we are doing. The first is that our presence is not desired by any Afghan of spirit in the country, and the second and far more serious is that we have on our hands and are proclaiming ourselves the protectors of a sovereign who has scarcely a vestige of power.