A wonderful country truly, and something in the air to day that makes my guide ride as hard as the road will permit, with his sword drawn across the saddle before him. My revolver is in my hand. And so we clatter along, mile after mile, through the beautiful series of little valleys, grim villages, and towers. Now and again a party of women will step aside to let us pass, or a dog start up to bark at us, but not a single man do we see. Yet I know very well that hundreds of men see us ride by, and that a jezail is lying at every loophole, and covering the very path we ride on.
We reach a sudden turn of the path; my guide gallops round it. He is hardly out of my sight when Bang! bang! It is no use pulling up, and the next instant I am round the corner too. A man, with his jezail still smoking from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden down. Another man comes running down the hillside towards him. In front of me, some fifty yards off, is my guide, with his horse's head towards me and his sword in his hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of brightly-coloured clothing—a dead Afridi! For a second both guide and I thought that it was we who had drawn the fire from the ambushed men. But no, it the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before us, and the victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close by, but his lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying there on either side of his path, had shot him as he passed.
But what a group we were! Myself, with my revolver in my hand, looking, horror-stricken, now at the dead, and now at his murderers; my guide, in the splendid uniform of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as only Orientals can be; the two murderers talking together excitedly; in the middle of us the dead lad! But there was still another figure to be added, for suddenly, along the very path by which the victim had come, there came running an old woman—perhaps she had followed the lad with a mother's tender anxiety for his safety—and in an instant she saw the worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself down with the cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boys side, and as my guide turned to ride on and I followed him, as the murderers slipped away into the undergrowth, we all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body of her murdered son.
II.
I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, and, turning to look as I passed, at the Catholic church, had caught an idle glimpse of the folk in the street. Among them was a woman at the wooden gateway of a small house, hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing it open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she did not lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed and the cursory glance I gave, to be listening to what somebody was saying to her through the window. Had I been only a few yards nearer! At the moment that I saw her, the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified eyes upon a face—a grim and cruel face—that glared at her from a window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at her breast. And the next instant, just as I had turned the corner, there was the report of fire-arms. It did not occur to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a cry, and then a second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her knitted shawl over her head, and the wind blowing her light dress to one side.
I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the shots had only the merest flash of a connexion in my mind. But after a few steps a man came running past me, going perhaps for the doctor, or the police, or the coroner, and the scared look on his face suddenly once more wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the wicket.
So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the middle of the road, with a man stooping over her and two women, transfixed by sudden terror into attitudes that were most tragic, I saw the woman lying. Her face was turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had fallen back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was already dead. And her murderer? He too had gone to his last account; and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha road, with the wind raising wisps of dust about the horror-stricken group, and thought of the two dead bodies lying there, one in the roadway, the other in the house close by, my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before their Maker, and that perhaps she, the poor mangled woman, was pleading for mercy for the man, her husband, the lover of her youth—her murderer.
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In the evening, when a cool breeze was blowing, and imagination pictured the trees holding up screens of green foliage before the hotel windows to shut out the ugly views of half-built streets, I entertained feelings that were almost kindly towards Omaha; but the memory of the day that was happily past, as often as it recurred to me, changed them to gall again. All day long there had been a flaring, glaring sun overhead and the wind that was blowing would have done credit to the deserts through which I have since marched with the army in Egypt. It went howling down the street with the voices of wild beasts, and carried with it such simooms of sand as would probably in a week overwhelm and bury in Ninevite oblivion the buildings of this aspiring town. And not only sand, but whirlwinds of vulgar dust also, with occasional discharges of cinders, that came rushing along the road, picking up all the rubbish it could find, dodging up alleys and coming out again with accumulations of straw, rampaging into courtyards in search of paper and rags, standing still in the middle of the roadway to whirl, and altogether behaving itself just as a disreputable and aggressive vagabond may be always expected to behave. Of course I was told it was a "very exceptional" day. It always is a "very exceptional day" wherever a stranger goes. But I must confess that I never saw any place—except Aden, and perhaps East London, in South Africa—that struck me on short acquaintance as so thoroughly undesirable for a lengthened abode. The big black swine rooting about in the back yards, the little black boys playing drearily at "marbles" with bits of stone, the multitude of dogs loafing on the sidewalks, the depressing irregularity Of the streets, the paucity of shade-trees, the sandy bluffs that dominate the town and hold over the heads of the inhabitants the perpetual threat of siroccos, and the general appearance (however false it may have been) of disorder—all combined with various degrees of force to give the impression that Omaha is a place that had from some cause or another been suddenly checked in its natural expansion.
Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding one, and already the great smelting works, with one exception the busiest in the States, the splendid workshops of the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving distillery close by, give promise of the great industries which in the future this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, as the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract to itself. Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when its hotel is rebuilt it will be able to offer visitors good accommodation. It has also an imposing school-house imposingly advertised by being on top of a hill, and the refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the "stove-pipe" hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced civilization. But all this affords encouragement for the future only; at present Omaha is a depressing spot. And so I left the town without regret; but I did not make any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was impossible; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so completely that nothing but shredding my garments into their original threads would have sufficed.