“A barrack-school?” said Kim, who had asked many questions and thought more.
“Yes, I suppose so,” said the master. “It will not do you any harm to keep you out of mischief. You can go up with young De Castro as far as Delhi.”
Kim considered it in every possible light. He had been diligent, even as the Colonel advised. A boy’s holiday was his own property—of so much the talk of his companions had advised him—and a barrack-school would be torment after St. Xavier’s. Moreover—this was magic worth anything else—he could write. In three months he had discovered how men can speak to each other without a third party, at the cost of half an anna and a little knowledge. No word had come from the lama, but there remained the Road. Kim yearned for the caress of soft mud squishing up between the toes, as his mouth watered for mutton stewed with butter and cabbages, for rice speckled with strong scented cardamoms, for the saffron-tinted rice, garlic and onions, and the forbidden greasy sweetmeats of the bazaars. They would feed him raw beef on a platter at the barrack-school, and he must smoke by stealth. But again, he was a Sahib and was at St. Xavier’s, and that pig Mahbub Ali … No, he would not test Mahbub’s hospitality—and yet … He thought it out alone in the dormitory, and came to the conclusion he had been unjust to Mahbub.
The school was empty; nearly all the masters had gone away; Colonel Creighton’s railway pass lay in his hand, and Kim puffed himself that he had not spent Colonel Creighton’s or Mahbub’s money in riotous living. He was still lord of two rupees seven annas. His new bullock-trunk, marked “ K. O’H. ,” and bedding-roll lay in the empty sleeping-room.