voices must if you ram a thrice-doubled coat on to the wax cylinder and into the works of an expensive phonograph. Kim finished his slumbers with a serene mind.
In the morning he was aware of Lurgan Sahib looking down on him.
“Oah!” said Kim, firmly resolved to cling to his Sahib-dom. “There was a box in the night that gave me bad talk. So I stopped it. Was it your box?”
The man held out his hand.
“Shake hands, O’Hara,” he said. “Yes, it was my box. I keep such things because my friends the Rajahs like them. That one is broken, but it was cheap at the price. Yes, my friends, the Kings are very fond of toys—and so am I sometimes.”
Kim looked him over out of the corners of his eyes. He was a Sahib in that he wore Sahib’s clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the intonation of his English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib. He seemed to understand what moved in Kim’s mind ere the boy opened his mouth, and he took no pains to explain himself as did Father Victor or the Lucknow masters. Sweetest of all—he treated Kim as an equal on the Asiatic side.
“I am sorry you cannot beat my boy this morning. He says he will kill you with a knife or poison. He is jealous, so I have put him in the corner and I shall not speak to him today. He has just tried to kill me. You must help me with the breakfast. He is almost too jealous to trust, just now.”
Now a genuine imported Sahib from England would have made a great to-do over this tale. Lurgan Sahib stated it as simply as Mahbub Ali was used to record his little affairs in the North.
The back veranda of the shop was built out over the sheer hillside, and they looked down into their neighbours’ chimney-pots, as is the custom