I pushed Sikandar Khan with my foot, and he saw it too. He said, “One of the Boer-log who brought pumpkins for the mess, which I fried last night, lives in yonder house.” I said, “How dost thou know?” He said, “Because he rode out of the camp another way, but I marked how his horse fought with him at the turn of the road; and before the light fell I stole out of the camp for evening prayer with Kurban Sahib’s glasses, and from a little hill I saw the pied horse of that pumpkin-seller hurrying to that house.” I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib’s glasses from his greasy hands and cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case. Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley to use glasses—whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course of three months’ leave. But he was otherwise a liar. That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march. We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There was an old man in the verandah—an old man with a white beard and a wart upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding. His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered and he sported sportively before Kurban Sahib. The man brought coffee and the woman showed us _purwanas_ from three General Sahibs, certifying that they were people of peace and goodwill. Here are the _purwanas_, Sahib. Does the Sahib know the Generals who signed them?