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Finally Futteh Ali Shah forgot all his Bombay manners; he leaned across Ralston, and cried to Rahat Mian: "Do you know what I would like to do with you? I would like to string my bedstead with your skin and lie on it." And upon that Ralston arrived at the conclusion that the meeting might as well come to an end. He dismissed Rahat Mian, promising him a safe conveyance to his home.
Matters improved, however, as he advanced further into the country; and, at the little mountain-city of Nahun, he was most hospitably received and entertained by the young rajah, Futteh Pur Grass Sing, "who had been educated almost entirely under the kind and fatherly superintendence of Captain Murray," the commissioner of the Seik states, and whose frank and gentlemanlike manners, "so unlike those of the ghee-fed wretches of the plains," did honour to his guardian's precepts.
While Pollock was gathering his brigades at Gundamuk in the beginning of the following September, a forlorn Afghan, in dirty and tattered rags, rode into his camp. This scarecrow was Futteh Jung, who, unable to endure longer his sham kingship and the ominous tyranny of Akbar Khan, had fled from Cabul in disguise to beg a refuge in the British camp.
The two colleagues, with many of their adherents, were assembled in the large hall, where the Queen, in a highly-excited state, was insisting upon an immediate disclosure of the murderer of Guggun Singh, who was supposed to have been her paramour. At this moment Jung gave the signal for the seizure of Futteh Jung.
The fear of ridicule there was the weak point of the Afridi, as Ralston very well knew. To be laughed at Futteh Ali Shah, who was wont to lord it among his friends, writhed under the mere possibility. And how they would laugh in and round about Peshawur!
A stripling of fourteen, in the crowded streets of Peshawur in broad day, as the buyers and the sellers thronged the thoroughfares of the city, he slew one of the enemies of Futteh Khan, and galloped home to report the achievement to the Wuzeer. From that time his rise was rapid.
Futteh Ali Shah looked about him fearfully, making sure that there was no one within earshot. Then in a whisper he said: "The grain is the army which will rise up from the hills and descend from the heavens to destroy the power of the Government. The melons are the forces of the Government; for as easily as melons they will be cut into pieces."
It does not seem worth while to discuss the vexed question whether or not he was faithful to his British allies. He was certainly entitled to argue that he owed us nothing, since what we did in regard to him was nakedly for our own purposes. Shah Soojah's second son Futteh Jung had himself proclaimed his father's successor. The vicissitudes of his short reign need not be narrated.
Futteh Ali, the old Shah of Persia, died in 1834, and was succeeded by his grandson Prince Mahomed Meerza, a young man who inherited much of the ambition of his gallant father Abbas Meerza. His especial aspiration, industriously stimulated by his Russian advisers, urged him to the enterprise of conquering the independent principality of Herat, on the western border of Afghanistan.
"But a little exercise will be good for both of us; and they continued to walk along the road. The heat was overpowering; Futteh Ali Shah was soft from too much good living; his thin patent-leather shoes began to draw his feet and gall his heels; his frock coat was tight; the perspiration poured down his face. Ralston was hot, too.
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