This is vintage Henty with brave British soldiers overcoming primitive warriors with superior firepower and more importantly, good military planning.

Captain Ripon is a judge and when he convicts a gypsy of stealing expensive chickens and sentences him to jail for 5 years, his wife threatens the judge with revenge. Some years later the judge has a new born son who his mother is dismayed to find a birth mark on his shoulder. As he grows to be two, he still has difficulty speaking . One afternoon he disappears and the parents are given a clear sign the gypsy woman stole him. Unknown to them, the woman dies shortly after leaving the little boy at the poor house where he can't speak enough to say who he is. They name him William Gale.

When he is 16, he is given a job on a fishing boat where he does well until his boat is in a collision with a huge ship that he manages to board and which eventually lands him in Java. That ship runs aground in a typhoon and after being assisted by the natives, is rescued by a British ship that takes him to Calcutta where he joins the British Army just in time to take part in the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

Henty spends this portion of the book giving us a history of the many battles and skirmishes of that war and little on the adventures of Gale. He includes criticism of officers who made serious errors during the campaign. While the history of the period is interesting, when we consider how things are in Afghanistan now it shows how little things have changed there.

Gale saves Captain Ripon's life and eventually the Captain realizes that Gale is his son and they are reunited spending the rest of their life on the family estate. ( )

Tells the story of a war in Afganistan when it was the dividing line between the British and Russian empires. Originally written in 1886.