In November he was transferred to the divisional command of the Peshawur District, a more important, but also a more unquiet post than Rawul Pindi. Thenceforth for three years he was to be the Warden of the turbulent north-western frontier. It pleased him to find in his command his old regiment the Ninety-Eighth, and also the Sixty-First which he had led at Chillianwallah. When in February, 1850, Sir Charles Napier reached Peshawur on a tour of inspection, Sir Colin was able to assemble for review quite a little army of all ranks; three troops of horse-artillery and two field-batteries, three cavalry regiments, three European and three native infantry regiments. While Sir Charles was in Colin Campbell's district, it happened that he came under hostile fire for the last time in his tumultuous life. Between Peshawur and Kohat, both places in British territory, a mountain road ran outside that territory through a long and dangerous defile. The Afridis inhabiting the intervening hill country had complained that their subsidy for keeping open the pass had not been paid, and in revenge had slaughtered a working party of sappers and miners. Sir Charles determined to force the defile in person. Campbell, on Napier's requisition, detailed a tolerably strong force as escort to the Commander-in-Chief. It chanced that before starting Napier inspected a regiment of irregulars under the control of the much-vaunted Punjaub Government. The men were of fine physique, but "one soldier had a musket without a lock, another a lock without a musket. A stalwart soldier, his broad chest swelling with military pride, his eyes sparkling with a malicious twinkle, held on his shoulder between his finger and thumb a flint--his only arm." The defile was duly forced, but its passage was one long skirmish. Kohat was inspected and reinforced, but Napier, on commencing his return march, found that the pickets left to keep the road open had been roughly handled and had suffered serious loss. The Afridis were very daring, and actually fired on Sir Charles and his staff at short range. The loss sustained in this somewhat quixotic expedition amounted to one hundred and ten men killed and wounded--"not much," comments Napier grimly, "when one considers the terrible defile through which we passed, defended by a warlike race." His biographer calls the enterprise an "interesting episode"; it certainly was not a very wise enterprise to be undertaken by the Commander-in-Chief of British India. It was Napier's last eccentricity of a military character. By the end of the year he resigned the command of the army of India, and was succeeded by Sir William Gomm, an old brother officer of Colin Campbell in the Ninth in the Peninsula days.