He filled it up with water, and drank it off.
"Now, Azim, do you do the same."
Azim, who was not a very strict Mohammedan, and had more than once tasted the forbidden drink at Cabul, needed no pressing.
"Well, master," he said, as he put the cup down, "after all this is better than lying dead and frozen down in the pass."
Angus, warmed with the good meal and by the draught that he had taken, could not disagree with his follower.
"I begin to think that you are right, Azim, though I did not believe so yesterday. It is certain that had I joined my countrymen I should have perished with them, and assuredly I have been saved from eight days of awful suffering and from death—if, indeed, we are saved from death."
"I think we can feel certain of that, master. This is not the way the Afghans treat a man whose throat they intend to cut. They certainly do not make a pillau for him, or provide him with a bottle of spirits."
"Do you know, I have been thinking, Azim," Angus said after a short silence, "that if it had been possible for Sadut Khan to know that we intended to leave camp in disguise, this might be his work again. But he could not have known it. No one but you and I, and Major Pottinger, and the three or four officers to whom I said good-bye, knew anything about it. Besides, he would have sent the men who captured us before, and who knew us by sight. And even supposing, which seems to be impossible, that this was his doing, why not have sent us here straight, instead of taking eight days to do a journey that could have been made easily in two, and forcing me to witness the awful scenes in the passes? It is all most extraordinary."
"However, there is no question, sir, that whoever our captor may be, he has been the means of saving our lives."