Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/162

156 the Envoy, horror-stricken, struggling to rise, his wrists locked in the grasp of Muhammad Akbar himself. Maddened either by the fierceness of the struggle or perhaps by the Envoy's angry taunts, Akbar shot him through the body with one of the pistols which Macnaghten had given him a few hours before. Meanwhile Trevor and Mackenzie had both, like Lawrence, been seized and pinioned; and each of the three was placed on horseback behind one of his captors, who bore him off at speed over the frozen snow towards a neighbouring fort. Bands of furious Afgháns, armed with swords, guns, or bludgeons, pressed upon the horsemen, yelling for the blood of the Káfirs, and aiming at them blows which sometimes hit their mark. Lawrence and Mackenzie got through their perilous ride without serious hurt, but Trevor, slipping off his horse, was cut to pieces by the long Afghán knives.

The body of the murdered Envoy was hacked in pieces by the exulting Gházis, who bore his remains in triumph through the streets of Kábul, and set up his head in the Chár Chauk, the great central bazaar of the city. That the murder was unpremeditated there is every reason to believe. Akbar had laid a trap for the Envoy, but his object was to confirm his own ascendency among the Afghan leaders, and to carry off the Sháh's English Minister as a living guarantee for his own father's restoration and the deliverance of his country from foreign rule. One of