One day Dafadar Narrain Khan was squatting with a few of his sowars on the wall of the enclosure, looking out over the country before him. The building commanded a prospect extending for many miles. Its immediate vicinity was barren, stony ground; one scraggy tree raised its wizened branches at the angle of the wall. A narrow track wound through this wilderness from the doorway down the hill to the plain below, meandering northward among boulders and patches of sparse vegetation until it was lost to sight amid the dark pine-trees that covered the lower slopes of the distant hills. Beyond, as far as the eye could reach, these hills stretched, an endless series of scarps and eminences, cleft by tortuous ravines and breaking away here and there into sheer precipices. In the remote distance, a jagged snow-clad ridge flashed with purple and gold in the rays of the sun. In the opposite direction, southward, the country was rugged but less hilly. A metalled road wound away into the distance. At regular intervals on one side of it stood tall posts, carrying a telegraph wire that emerged from a hole in the tower wall. As the troopers sat there chatting, with their rifles in the hollow of their arms, there was a sudden cry from the sentinel posted alone on the top of the tower. "Hai, dafadar! I see a speck moving in the sky far away," he shouted. "How far away, Coja?" called the dafadar. "Seven kos at least," was the reply. "The speck is in your own eye, my son," cried the dafadar, and the men about him laughed: Coja was always seeing something! The sentinel shouted a word of expostulation, then was silent, and the others resumed the conversation he had interrupted. Half an hour passed away. The time came for changing the guard. One of the men rose, sauntered along the wall, disappeared through a narrow opening in the tower, and presently emerged on the summit. Apparently he had a brief altercation with the man he had relieved. In five minutes Coja came from the tower along the wall. "Wah! you may mock, dafadar," he said; "but I declare by the beard of my father I saw a speck--a black speck moving." "You have chewed too much betel, Coja," said the dafadar with composure. "I too have seen dancing specks when my stomach was out of order." "Yes, but do those motes in the eye grow larger? Do they swell from the size of a pinpoint to the size of a little bird, and then to a great one? I thought at first it was peradventure an eagle of the mountains, but, inshallah! no eagle could look so large such a great way off. Is there a bird bigger than an eagle? Speak out of your great knowledge, dafadar." "There is none, foolish one--none that flies, though I have heard of a great bird that runs upon the ground swifter than the iron horse that runs on rails; the mem-sahibs wear its feathers in their hats."