e hills of a section of the Wazir tribe. He was passing along one
of those deep gorges which the mountain torrents have worn through
the maze of sandstone ridges, where the stunted acacia and tufted
grass afford pasturage to little else than the mountain goats, when
his practised eye descried two heads looking over the ridge four
hundred feet above him. Seeing they were observed, the two Wazirs
stood up and challenged them.

"Who called you to come poaching in our country?" "I shall come
when I choose, without asking your permission," retorted the
Khattak. "Swine! has your father turned you out because there was no
maize in your corn-bin?" The Khattak retorted with something stronger,
and each proceeded to impugn the character of the other's female
relations, till the Wazir, thinking he had excited the Khattak to
give him sufficient provocation, sent a bullet whistling past his
head. The Khattak made a jump for the cover of a neighbouring rock,
but before he had time to gain shelter a second bullet had struck
him in the leg, bringing him headlong to earth. His companion had got
the shelter of a rock and opened fire on the Wazirs; but the latter,
thinking they had sufficiently vindicated the privacy of their stony
hills, made off another way.

The Khattak could do no more than lift his friend into the shelter
of a cliff, stanch the bleeding with a piece torn from his pagari,
and make off in hot haste for his village to sound a chigah and bring
a bed on which the wounded man might be carried home. The chigah, of
course, came too late to track the Wazirs, but they bore the wounded
man home, and next morning brought him to the mission hospital. He lay
there for three months, carefully tended by his father and a brother,
and there all three were attentive listeners to the daily exposition
of the Gospel by the doctor or catechist; but the wounded man got
weaker and weaker, and when it became clear to all that his recovery
could not be hoped for, they took him off to his home to die.

The next day a Wazir of the same tribe that had shot him was brought
in suffering from an almost identical gunshot wound, and we thought
at first it had been the work of an avenger, but it proved to have
been received in another feud about the possession of a few ber-trees
(Zizyphus jujuba). This Wazir submitted to amputation, and is now
going about the hills the proud possessor of an artificial limb from
England, which his father sold a rifle