'Do not lose the direction, men,' cried an officer, 'but keep well up against the stream,' he added, knowing that when crossing thus there is always a tendency to edge lower down with the current.
The leading sections began to enter the stream, the rippling eddies of which went past them, tipped with silver by the pale moonlight; the rest followed closely, the guide directing, and erelong Colville and others found the water rising to their feet, then it rose as high as their knees, and was beginning to get higher, while the pony of the guide had quitted the angled line of the ford, and was swimming away to another point.
'Treachery,' thought Colville; at that moment the loonghee fell from the face of the guide, and he recognised Mahmoud Shah, the sirdir with the slashed cheek—Mahmoud, the hadji, whom he had saved from the Wahabees!
'This is getting awkward!' exclaimed Redhaven, 'there must be some mistake.'
'We are betrayed!' cried Colville.
He put his hand to his pistol-case, but too late, for now his horse rolled over, and with an exulting shriek in English of 'Pigs! dogs! Kaffirs!—drown and be damned! Eblis and hell await you! In vain will ye seek the Lord of the Daybreak!' cried the treacherous guide; then he reached the Jellalabad side in safety and vanished—pony and all.
All was confusion, consternation, and death now, for the water, flowing at the rate of nine miles an hour, had risen to the saddle bows and holsters of the Hussars, whose spirited horses, finding their footing gone, ignored the use of spur and bridle.
The line of the ford was lost now; the current pouring over it soon forced the horses downward into deeper water, sweeping the squadron away towards the swifter rapids, and in a mass of confusion our gallant Hussars, with their terrified horses, were struggling desperately and madly for existence, under the dim moonlight and amid the fiercely rushing waters, while the bewildered Bengal Lancers could only sit in their saddles and look helplessly on.
An officer whose horse had kicked Robert Wodrow, rendering him nearly insensible, failed to escape, and both were swept away, so, natheless, his reckless quotation from St. Luke's Gospel, there was to be no 'to-morrow' for the latter.
Captain D'Esterre Spottiswoode—afterwards colonel—was mounted on a very splendid and powerful horse, which was able to swim well, and bore him to the other bank in safety, but not to the end of the ford.