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 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 manloads of very bad