“Then they both lay still, but I think they were nearly dead when they were put on the te-rain . Their heads moved thus. And there is much blood on the line. Come and see?”
“I have seen blood before. Jail is the sure place—and assuredly they will give false names, and assuredly no man will find them for a long time. They were unfriends of mine. Thy fate and mine seem on one string. What a tale for the healer of pearls! Now swiftly with the saddlebags and the cooking-platter. We will take out the horses and away to Simla.”
Swiftly—as Orientals understand speed—with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn. Kim, regarded as Mahbub Ali’s favourite by all who wished to stand well with the Pathan, was not called upon to work. They strolled on by the easiest of stages, halting every few hours at a wayside shelter. Very many Sahibs travel along the Kalka road; and, as Mahbub Ali says, every young Sahib must needs esteem himself a judge of a horse, and, though he be over head in debt to the moneylender, must make as if to buy. That was the reason that Sahib after Sahib, rolling along in a stage-carriage, would stop and open talk. Some would even descend from their vehicles and feel the horses’ legs; asking inane questions, or, through sheer ignorance of the vernacular, grossly insulting the imperturbable trader.
“When first I dealt with Sahibs, and that was when Colonel Soady Sahib was Governor of Fort Abazai and flooded the Commissioner’s camping-ground for spite,” Mahbub confided to Kim as the boy filled his pipe under a tree, “I did not know how greatly they were fools, and this made me wroth. As thus—” and he told Kim a tale of an expression, misused in all innocence, that doubled Kim up with mirth. “Now I see, however,”—he exhaled smoke slowly—“that it is with them as with all men—in certain matters they are wise, and in others most foolish. Very