'Yes; he looks like a man with a past.'
'He has indeed a past history, poor fellow, a sorrowful and not a happy one.'
'Every broken-down fellow takes to the cavalry now,' grumbled Redhaven; 'but I was certain he has some secret by the expression of his eyes, and the inflections of his modulated voice at times.'
'Poor fellow!' said Colville again.
He knew, what Redhaven did not, that Robert Wodrow was often a prey to sad and bitter thoughts; that in the dreams of the night and of the day when asleep in the wet-flapping tent or the comfortless bivouac—when on solitary vidette duty, under the blazing Afghan sun, he saw oftener before him—not the fair face of her for whom he had sacrificed everything, and whom, he doubted not, would soon become the bride of another—but the face of his loving mother—a kind and happy old face—that ever beamed with love for him; and opposite her fancy saw his silver-haired old father, reading some good or musty volume—Wodrow's Analecta Scotica perhaps; and often from such visions of home he was roused by the trumpet blowing 'boot and saddle,' or the yell of an Afghan scout armed with juzail and charah.
As a Scotsman, Colville was superstitious enough to regret that at such a time the young fellow should show such exuberance of spirits as the foreboding of evil, and was in the act of urging his horse forward to accost him kindly, when the brigadier came on the ground, the component parts of the column were called to 'attention,' and in a few minutes after, the whole force was on the march, and, with the glittering of sword and bayonet blades, section after section quickly disappeared from the eyes of those who watched them in the cold wintry moonshine that had turned to diamonds the thick hoarfrost on every wall and tree; and the march began which was to prove the last to many in this life.
'The line of ground between Jellalabad and Cabul, so far as it is connected with India,' says a writer, 'is a line of tragedy and misfortune. That line of tragedy and misfortune may now be extended a couple of miles further to the east, for that will give very nearly the point where forty-six lives were on that Monday evening suddenly swept out of existence.'
The troops moved westward, the cavalry leading. The squadron of the 10th Hussars was under Captain D'Esterre Spottiswoode, that of the Bengal Lancers was under its own captain, and Major E. A. Wood of the first-named corps commanded the whole.
Guided by an Afghan mountaineer who had offered his services, and to whom Colville paid a high bribe therefor, the orders of the officers were to cross the Cabul river at a point where most unluckily a temporary bridge had shortly before been removed. On achieving that, they were to move up the left bank of the stream, to march through Besoot and Darunta, and enter the Lughman Valley, to which the infantry were moving by the Jellalabad side of the Cabul.
The guide, who was mounted on a powerful and wiry yaboo, or Cabul pony, was a singularly taciturn fellow, and Colville remarked a circumstance which soon became a painful memory, that by twisting the end of his loonghee, or head-dress, across the lower part of his face he effectually concealed his features, permitting little more than his keen, black, and glittering eyes to be seen, reminding him of the muffled men he had read of in old Scottish Border forays.