lier. If you want to know what they fight with, reach under my
seat an' pull out the long knife that's there.'

They dragged out and beheld for the first time the grim, bone-handled,
triangular Afghan knife. It was almost as long as Lew.

'That's the thing to jint ye,' said the trooper feebly. 'It can take
off a man's arm at the shoulder as easy as slicing butter. I halved
the beggar that used that 'un, but there's more of his likes up above.
They don't understand thrustin', but they're devils to slice.'

The men strolled across the tracks to inspect the Afghan prisoners.
They were unlike any 'niggers' that the Fore and Aft had ever
met--these huge, black-haired, scowling sons of the Beni-Israel. As
the men stared the Afghans spat freely and muttered one to another
with lowered eyes.

'My eyes! Wot awful swine!' said Jakin, who was in the rear of the
procession. 'Say, old man, how you got _puckrowed_, eh? _Kiswasti_ you
wasn't hanged for your ugly face, hey?'

The tallest of the company turned, his leg-irons clanking at the
movement, and stared at the boy. 'See!' he cried to his fellows in
Pushto. 'They send children against us. What a people, and what
fools!'

[Illustration: The men strolled across the tracks to inspect
the Afghan prisoners.--P. 50.]

'_Hya!_' said Jakin, nodding his head cheerily. 'You go down-country.
_Khana_ get, _peenikapanee_ get--live like a bloomin' Raja _ke
marfik_. That's a better _bandobust_ than baynit get it in your
innards. Good-bye, ole man. Take care o' your beautiful figure-'ad,
an' try to look _kushy_.'

The men laughed and fell in for their first march, when they began to
realise that a soldier's life was not all beer and skittles. They were
much impressed with the size and bestial ferocity of the niggers whom
they had now learned to call 'Paythans,' and more with the exceeding
discomfort of their own surroundings. Twenty old soldiers in the corps
would have taught them how to make themselves moderately snug at
night, but they had no old soldiers, and, as the troops on the line of
march said, 'they lived like pigs.' They learned the heart-breaking
cussedness of camp-kitchens and camels and the depravity of an E.P.
tent and a wither-wrung mule. They studied animalculae in water, and
developed a few cases of dysentery in their study.

At the end of their third march they were disagreeably surprised by
the arrival in their camp of a hammered iron slug which, fired from