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Stories by English Authors: The Orient (Selected by Scribners) by Unknown
page 33 of 149 (22%)

"But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the people. They were
afraid of me and the Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of
friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but any one could come across
the hills with a complaint, and Dravot would hear him out fair, and call
four priests together and say what was to be done. He used to call in
Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an old Chief
we called Kafuzelum,--it was like enough to his real name,--and hold
councils with 'em when there was any fighting to be done in small
villages. That was his Council of War, and the four priests of Bashkai,
Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between the lot of 'em
they sent me, with forty men and twenty rifles, and sixty men carrying
turquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those hand-made Martini
rifles, that come out of the Amir's workshops at Kabul, from one of the
Amir's Herati regiments that would have sold the very teeth out of their
mouths for turquoises.

"I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of
my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some
more, and, between the two and the tribes-people, we got more than a
hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails that'll throw
to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for the
rifles. I came back with what I had, and distributed 'em among the men
that the Chiefs sent in to me to drill. Dravot was too busy to attend
to those things, but the old Army that we first made helped me, and we
turned out five hundred men that could drill, and two hundred that knew
how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those cork-screwed, hand-made
guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder-shops and
factories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the winter was
coming on.
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