And she came without a word.
[26] Early breakfast.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE CHEAPER MAN.
"No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulæ the text-books show,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow:
Strike hard, who cares—shoot straight, who can;
The odds are on the cheaper man!"
—Rudyard Kipling: Arithmetic on the Frontier.
The second week in March found the little force from Kohat still skirmishing energetically through a network of ravines, nullahs, and jagged red hills; still dealing out rough justice to unrepentant Afridis in accordance with instructions from headquarters; or as nearly in accordance with them as Colonel Buchanan's pronounced views on the ethics of warfare would permit. For Buchanan was a just man of independent character, a type not ostentatiously beloved by heads of departments. He had a reprehensible trick of thinking for himself and acting accordingly—a habit liable to create havoc among the card-houses of officialdom; and like all soldiers of the first grade, he was resolute against the cowardly method of striking at the guilty through the innocent; resolute in limiting the evils of war to its authors and active abettors.
He had taken full advantage of his temporary rank to run the expedition on his own lines; and although his instructions included the burning of crops, he had kept rigid control over this part of the programme; giving officers and men free scope for activity in the demolishing of armed forts and towers, and in skirmishes with the wild tribes who harried their transport trains, rushed their pickets, sent playful bullets whizzing through the mess-tent at night, and generally enjoyed themselves after the rough and ready fashion of the hillsman across the Border.
The Afridis in truth were merely tired of behaving like good children. The unstained knives at their belts cried shame on them for their prolonged abstinence from the legitimate joys of manhood;—the music of bullets whistling down a gorge, the yielding of an enemy's flesh under the knife.