Page:The Phantom 'Rickshaw - Kipling (1890).djvu/100

 it. And when they wasn't doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans and Afghans. 'You can fight those when they came into our country,' says Dravot. 'Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared anymore so long as he does well, and I know that you won't cheat me because you're white people—sons of Alexander—and not like common black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,' says he running off into English at the end—'I'll make a damned fine nation of you, or die in the making!'

I can't tell all we did for the next six months because Dravot did a lot I couldn't see the lean off, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again go out with some of the army and see what the other villages were doing, and make 'em throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans which I could not advise him regarding, and I just waited for orders.

"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 Picky 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 needful in the 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 baskets of torquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those handmade Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir's workshops