Two days passed, and still no plan had suggested itself. On the third day, there rode up to the village a tall, black-bearded horseman clad in worn and tattered garments of dust colour, and carrying sword, lance and carbine. When he had come within a short distance of the gate Ahsan shouted—
"Halt, there! Who are you, and what is your business?"
"Knowst thou me not, Ahsan?" came the reply. "Dost not remember Sherdil, son of Assad? Thou didst thrash me often enough, and truly the soft part of me will never forget thy thwackings."
"Why, Sherdil, thy beard has grown since those days. I remember thee well. Come in, and say why thou ridest in garments of so strange a make."
Sherdil rode in, eyed curiously by the crowd of men and boys whom the brief conversation had drawn to the spot. He was a magnificent specimen of a Pathan, tall, handsome of feature, well made, and his horse was a match for him. Dismounting, he led his horse by the bridle and went to pay his respects to the chief.
Sherdil had left the village nearly eight years before, when he was a youth of seventeen. He had been the wildest and most unruly boy of the tribe, always in mischief, showing no respect for his elders—one day he had called a holy sayad "old scaldhead," and laughed when his father thrashed him for it. He had been incorrigibly lazy at school: not all the mullah's thwackings drove into his thick head the scraps from the Koran which formed the greater part of his lessons, and he was always very rebellious at having to fast from sunrise to sunset in Ramzan, the ninth month. But in tent-pegging and racing and sword-play he beat all boys of his age, and indeed many of the men; and when he insisted on joining them in their expeditions, which happened at the age of sixteen, he excelled them all as a highway robber and a horse-thief.
When he was seventeen he ran away, and nothing had since been heard of him. His mother grieved, for he was her firstborn; but his father, having three more sons, was not greatly distressed, for the boy had always been a trouble to him. And now he had come back, grown out of knowledge, with a fine black beard and the look of a seasoned warrior.
His father, Assad, as in duty bound, made a great feast in honour of the returned prodigal. He invited a great number of his neighbours, and regaled them with the flesh of sheep and goats and—this was a great luxury—fowls, and beautifully light chapatis baked by his wife Fatima herself, and luscious sweetmeats made of honey and ghi; but the only drink was water. And having been well fed, Sherdil related the story of his life since he had left Shagpur—a good riddance, as most of the folk thought.
It was a stirring tale, of wild doings on the borders, among men who kept the passes into the hills and lived amid inaccessible rocks, whence they swept down upon unsuspecting travellers and merchants in the plains, and even pushed their forays across the frontiers among the sahib-log. His audience uttered many an exclamation of wonderment and admiration as he recounted his exploits, and you may be sure he did not minimize them. The men about him were robbers and brigands and murderers themselves, but their deeds faded into insignificance beside the bold and desperate adventures of Sherdil. Ahmed, who was among the company, listened with all his frame thrilling. He had a faint recollection of Sherdil as a big fellow who, rough as he was, had treated him with a certain kindness, and had shown him first how to snare a rabbit. And he felt a good deal of envy of this fine stalwart fellow who had seen and done so much.
One story of Sherdil's made the company hilarious. The chief to whom he for a time attached himself—one Dilawur, a native of Jahangia, a village on the Cabul river—heard one day that a wealthy Hindu shopkeeper was to be married. He instantly determined to profit by the bridegroom's happiness. With his men, among whom Sherdil was one, he lay in wait on the bank of the Indus at a place which the Hindu must pass on his way to the bride's house. When the expectant bridegroom came in sight, all bedizened with wristlets and chains and jewels, the brigands, armed with pistol, sword and dagger, fell upon the party, seized the luckless man, dragged him to the river bank, and thrust him into an inflated cow-hide. Then Sherdil mounted upon this monstrous bladder, and paddled it across the river. When the rest were across, the Hindu was carried away into the hills, and Dilawur's scribe—for he could not write himself—penned a letter to his sorrowing friends, informing them that their relative was well and happy, and would be restored to them fat and jolly for the little sum of two hundred rupees.