Chapter 1

I, John Fothergill West, student of law in the University of St. Andrews,
have endeavoured in the ensuing pages to lay my statement before the
public in a concise and business-like fashion.

It is not my wish to achieve literary success, nor have I any desire by
the graces of my style, or by the artistic ordering of my incidents, to
throw a deeper shadow over the strange passages of which I shall have
to speak. My highest ambition is that those who know something of the
matter should, after reading my account, be able to conscientiously
indorse it without finding a single paragraph in which I have either
added to or detracted from the truth.

Should I attain this result, I shall rest amply satisfied with the
outcome of my first, and probably my last, venture in literature.

It was my intention to write out the sequence of events in due order,
depending on trustworthy hearsay when I was describing that which was
beyond my own personal knowledge. I have now, however, through the
kind cooperation of friends, hit upon a plan which promises to be less
onerous to me and more satisfactory to the reader. This is nothing less
than to make use of the various manuscripts which I have by me bearing
upon the subject, and to add to them the first-hand evidence contributed
by those who had the best opportunities of knowing Major-General J. B.
Heatherstone.

In pursuance of this design I shall lay before the public the testimony
of Israel Stakes, formerly coachman at Cloomber Hall, and of
John Easterling, F.R.C.P. Edin., now practising at Stranraer, in
Wigtownshire. To these I shall add a verbatim account extracted from
the journal of the late John Berthier Heatherstone, of the events which
occurred in the Thul Valley in the autumn of '41 towards the end of
the first Afghan War, with a description of the skirmish in the Terada
defile, and of the death of the man Ghoolab Shah.

To myself I reserve the duty of filling up all the gaps and chinks which
may be left in the narrative. By this arrangement I have sunk from the
position of an author to that of a compiler, but on the other hand
my work has ceased to be a story and has expanded into a series of
affidavits.

My Father, John Hunter West, was a well known Oriental and Sanskrit
scholar, and his name is still of weight with those who are interested
in such matters. He it was who first after Sir William Jones called
attention to the great value of early Persian literature, and his
translations from the Hafiz and from Ferideddin Atar have earned the
warmest commendations from the Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, of Vienna,
and other distinguished Continental critics.

In the issue of the _Orientalisches Scienzblatt_ for January, 1861,
he is described as _“Der beruhmte und sehr gelhernte Hunter West von
Edinburgh”_--a passage which I well remember that he cut out and stowed
away, with a pardonable vanity, among the most revered family archives.

He had been brought up to be a solicitor, or Writer to the Signet, as
it is termed in Scotland, but his learned hobby absorbed so much of his
time that he had little to devote to the pursuit of his profession.

When his clients were seeking him at his chambers in George Street, he
was buried in the recesses of the Advocates' Library, or poring over
some mouldy manuscript at the Philosophical Institution, with his brain
more exercised over the code which Menu propounded six hundred years
before the birth of Christ than over the knotty problems of Scottish law
in the nineteenth century. Hence it can hardly be wondered at that
as his learning accumulated his practice dissolved, until at the very
moment when he had attained the zenith of his celebrity he had also
reached the nadir of his fortunes.

There being no chair of Sanscrit in any of his native universities, and
no demand anywhere for the only mental wares which he had to dispose
of, we should have been forced to retire into genteel poverty, consoling
ourselves with the aphorisms and precepts of Firdousi, Omar Khayyam, and
others of his Eastern favourites, had it not been for the kindness
and liberality of his half-brother William Farintosh, the Laird of
Branksome, in Wigtownshire.

This William Farintosh was the proprietor of a landed estate, the
acreage which bore, unfortunately, a most disproportional relation to
its value, for it formed the bleakest and most barren tract of land
in the whole of a bleak and barren shire. As a bachelor, however, his
expenses had been small, and he had contrived from the rents of his
scattered cottages, and the sale of the Galloway nags, which he bred
upon the moors, not only to live as a laird should, but to put by a
considerable sum in the bank.

We had heard little from our kinsman during the days of our comparative
prosperity, but just as we were at our wit's end, there came a letter
like a ministering angel, giving us assurance of sympathy and succour.
In it the Laird of Branksome told us that one of his lungs had been
growing weaker for some time, and that Dr. Easterling, of Stranraer, had
strongly advised him to spend the few years which were left to him in
some more genial climate. He had determined, therefore to set out for
the South of Italy, and he begged that we should take up our residence
at Branksome in his absence, and that my father should act as his land
steward and agent at a salary which placed us above all fear of want.

Our mother had been dead for some years, so that there were only myself,
my father, and my sister Esther to consult, and it may be readily
imagined that it did not take us long to decide upon the acceptance
of the laird's generous offer. My father started for Wigtown that very
night, while Esther and I followed a few days afterwards, bearing with
us two potato-sacksful of learned books, and such other of our household
effects that were worth the trouble and expense of transport.