The Afghans are excellent skirmishers, and their native juzails carry much farther than our regulation muskets; thus, before Waller's men could return their fire, one of his corporals uttered a yell of agony, bounded a yard from the ground, and then fell flat on his face, dead. A bullet had pierced a mortal part.
"Close up—close up, forward," cried Waller, leading them on, sword in hand; "those devils have got our range exactly now."
While he spoke the bullets were sowing thick the snow about General Trecarrel and Audley, who, being mounted men, were prominent figures. Meanwhile the horsemen had disappeared; but the wily Amen Oollah was merely making a detour to turn the flank of a group of pines that grew upon the steep slope, intending thereby to get into the rear of Waller's skirmishers and cut them off.
"Get under cover, lads, as best you may!" cried he, as his bugler sounded to "commence firing;" and with a dark, stern, and desperate expression in their hungry faces, his soldiers knelt behind rocks and stones, dead horses and camels, dhooleys and abandoned baggage-boxes, and proceeded to return the fire of the Afghans (about a hundred in number), who were taking quiet pot-shots at any head that appeared above the snow-clad rocks, behind which they were lurking.
Now and then a fiend-like yell, and pair of brown booted feet, or swarthy dark hands appearing wildly in the air, announced when an English bullet found its billet in a Mussulman body; and then the soldiers smiled grimly to each other, as they thought "there is one the less in the world, at all events."
This serious musketry practice, and the wailing of women and children, were the only morning reveillé in that melancholy halting place on the bank of the Loghur.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE SKIRMISH.
Gratitude to General Trecarrel, who had been kind to his dead mother, to Sybil, and ever so to himself, with a natural regard for the old soldier as the father of Rose, made Denzil linger near him, and beseech him to retire and not to expose his life needlessly. Absorbed in his great grief the General made no reply; with his face pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his teeth set, he sat on horseback and watched the turns of the skirmish.
The juzailchees fired with deadly aim as they levelled their long weapons over rests, or the rocks behind which they were crouching; thus some ten or twelve of Waller's skirmishers had fallen; of these five were dead, and others were creeping wounded to the halting-place, which some of them were not destined to reach, as they died of exhaustion, loss of blood, or another bullet by the way.