‘Allah! What is a beating when the very head is loose on the shoulders?’
Kim slid out quietly into the night, walked half round the house, keeping close to the walls, and headed away from the station for a mile or so. Then, fetching a wide compass, he worked back at leisure, for he needed time to invent a story if any of Mahbub’s retainers asked questions.
They were camped on a piece of waste ground beside the railway, and, being natives, had not, of course, unloaded the two trucks in which Mahbub’s animals stood among a consignment of country-breds bought by the Bombay tram-company. The headman, a broken-down, consumptive-looking Mohammedan, promptly challenged Kim, but was pacified at sight of Mahbub’s sign-manual.
‘The Hajji has of his favour given me service,’ said Kim testily. ‘If this be doubted, wait till he comes in the morning. Meantime, a place by the fire.’
Followed the usual aimless babble that every low-caste native must raise on every occasion. It died down, and Kim lay out behind the little knot of Mahbub’s followers, almost under the wheels of a horse-truck, a borrowed blanket for covering. Now a bed among brickbats and ballast-refuse on a damp night, between overcrowded horses and unwashen Baltis, would not appeal to many white boys; but Kim was utterly happy. Change of scene, service, and surroundings were the breath of his little nostrils, and thinking of the neat white cots of St. Xavier’s all arow under the punkah gave him joy as keen as the repetition of the multiplication-table in English.
‘I am very old,’ he thought sleepily. ‘Every month I become a year more old. I was very young, and a fool to boot, when I took Mahbub’s message to Umballa. Even when I was with that white Regiment I was very young and small and had no wisdom. But now I learn every day, and in three years the Colonel will take me out of the madrissah and let me go upon the Road with Mahbub hunting for horses’ pedigrees, or maybe I shall go by myself; or maybe I shall find the lama and go with him. Yes; that is best. To walk again as a chela with my lama when he comes back to Benares.’ The thoughts came more slowly and disconnectedly. He was plunging into a beautiful dreamland when his ears caught a whisper, thin and sharp, above the monotonous babble round the fire. It came from behind the iron-skinned horse-truck.
‘He is not here, then?’
‘Where should he be but roystering in the city. Who looks for a rat in a frog-pond? Come away. He is not our man.’
‘He must not go back beyond the Passes a second time. It is the order.’
‘Hire some woman to drug him. It is a few rupees only, and there is no evidence.’
‘Except the woman. It must be more certain; and remember the price upon his head.’
‘Ay, but the police have a long arm, and we are far from the Border. If it were in Peshawur, now!’
‘Yes—in Peshawur,’ the second voice sneered. ‘Peshawur, full of his blood-kin—full of bolt-holes and women behind whose clothes he will hide. Yes, Peshawur or Jehannum would suit us equally well.’
‘Then what is the plan?’
‘O fool, have I not told it a hundred times? Wait till he comes to lie down, and then one sure shot. The trucks are between us and pursuit. We have but to run back over the lines and go our way. They will not see whence the shot came. Wait here at least till the dawn. What manner of fakir art thou, to shiver at a little watching?’
‘Oho!’ thought Kim, behind close-shut eyes. ‘Once again it is Mahbub. Indeed a white stallion’s pedigree is not a good thing to peddle to Sahibs! Or maybe Mahbub has been selling other news. Now what is to do, Kim? I know not where Mahbub houses, and if he comes here before the dawn they will shoot him. That would be no profit for thee, Kim. And this is not a matter for the police. That would be no profit for Mahbub; and’—he giggled almost aloud—‘I do not remember any lesson at Nucklao which will help me. Allah! Here is Kim and yonder are they. First, then, Kim must wake and go away, so that they shall not suspect. A bad dream wakes a man—thus—’
He threw the blanket off his face, and raised himself suddenly with the terrible, bubbling, meaningless yell of the Asiatic roused by nightmare.
‘Urr-urr-urr-urr! Ya-la-la-la-la! Narain!209 The churel! The churel!’ A churel is the peculiarly malignant ghost of a woman who has died in child-bed. She haunts lonely roads, her feet are turned backwards on the ankles, and she leads men to torment.
Louder rose Kim’s quavering howl, till at last he leaped to his feet and staggered off sleepily, while the camp cursed him for waking them. Some twenty yards farther up the line he lay down again, taking care that the whisperers should hear his grunts and groans as he recomposed himself. After a few minutes he rolled towards the road and stole away into the thick darkness.
He paddled along swiftly till he came to a culvert, and dropped behind it, his chin on a level with the coping-stone. Here he could command all the night-traffic, himself unseen.
Two or three carts passed, jingling out to the suburbs; a coughing policeman and a hurrying foot-passenger or two who sang to keep off evil spirits. Then rapped the shod feet of a horse.
‘Ah! This is more like Mahbub,’ thought Kim, as the beast shied at the little head above the culvert.
‘Ohé, Mahbub Ali,’ he whispered, ‘have a care!’
The horse was reined back almost on its haunches, and forced towards the culvert.
‘Never again,’ said Mahbub, ‘will I take a shod horse for night-work. They pick up all the bones and nails in the city.’ He stooped to lift its forefoot, and that brought his head within a foot of Kim’s. ‘Down—keep down,’ he muttered. ‘The night is full of eyes.’
‘Two men wait thy coming behind the horse-trucks. They will shoot thee at thy lying down, because there is a price on thy head. I heard, sleeping near the horses.’
‘Didst thou see them? ... Hold still, Sire of Devils!’ This furiously to the horse.
‘No.’
‘Was one dressed belike as a fakir?’
‘One said to the other, “What manner of fakir art thou, to shiver at a little watching?” ’
‘Good. Go back to the camp and lie down. I do not die to-night.’
Mahbub wheeled his horse and vanished. Kim tore back down the ditch till he reached a point opposite his second resting-place, slipped across the road like a weasel, and re-coiled himself in the blanket.
‘At least Mahbub knows,’ he thought contentedly. ‘And certainly he spoke as one expecting it. I do not think those two men will profit by to-night’s watch.’
An hour passed, and, with the best will in the world to keep awake all night, he slept deeply. Now and again a night train roared along the metals within twenty feet of him; but he had all the Oriental’s indifference to mere noise, and it did not even weave a dream through his slumber.
Mahbub was anything but asleep. It annoyed him vehemently that people outside his tribe and unaffected by his casual amours should pursue him for the life. His first and natural impulse was to cross the line lower down, work up again, and, catching his well-wishers from behind, summarily slay them. Here, he reflected with sorrow, another branch of the Government, totally unconnected with Colonel Creighton, might demand explanations which would be hard to supply; and he knew that south the Border a perfectly ridiculous fuss is made about a corpse or so. He had not been troubled in this way since he sent Kim to Umballa with the message, and hoped that suspicion had been finally diverted.
Then a most brilliant notion struck him.
‘The English do eternally tell the truth,’ he said, ‘therefore we of this country are eternally made foolish. By Allah, I will tell the truth to an Englishman! Of what use is the Government police if a poor Kabuli be robbed of his horses in their very trucks. This is as bad as Peshawur! I should lay a complaint at the station. Better still, some young Sahib on the Railway! They are zealous, and if they catch thieves it is remembered to their honour.’
He tied up his horse outside the station, and strode on to the platform.
‘Hullo, Mahbub Ali!’ said a young Assistant
District Traffic Superintendent who was waiting to go down the line—a tall, tow-haired, horsey youth in dingy white linen. ‘What are you doing here? Selling weeds—eh?’
‘No; I am not troubled for my horses. I come to look for Lutuf Ullah. I have a truck-load up the line. Could any one take them out without the Railway’s knowledge?’
‘Shouldn’t think so, Mahbub. You can claim against us if they do.’
‘I have seen two men crouching under the wheels of one of the trucks nearly all the night. Fakirs do not steal horses, so I gave them no more thought. I would find Lutuf Ullah, my partner.’
‘The deuce you did? And you didn’t bother your head about it? ‘Pon my word, it’s just almost as well that I met you. What were they like, eh?’
‘They were only fakirs. They will no more than take a little grain, perhaps, from one of the trucks. There are many up the line. The State will never miss the dole. I came here seeking for my partner, Lutuf Ullah—’
‘Never mind your partner. Where are your horse-trucks?’
‘A little to this side of the farthest place where they make lamps for the trains.’
‘The signal-box? Yes.’
‘And upon the rail nearest to the road upon the right-hand side—looking up the line thus. But as regards Lutuf Ullah—a tall man with a broken nose, and a Persian greyhound—Aie!’
The boy had hurried off to wake up a young and enthusiastic policeman; for, as he said, the Railway had suffered much from depredations in the goods-yard. Mahbub Ali chuckled in his dyed beard.
‘They will walk in their boots, making a noise, and then they will wonder why there are no fakirs. They are very clever boys—Barton Sahib and Young Sahib.’
He waited idly for a few minutes, expecting to see them hurry up the line girt for action. A light engine slid through the station, and he caught a glimpse of young Barton in the cab.
‘I did that child an injustice. He is not altogether a fool,’ said Mahbub Ali. ‘To take a fire-carriage for a thief is a new game!’
When Mahbub Ali came to his camp in the dawn, no one thought it worth while to tell him any news of the night. No one, at least, but one small horseboy, newly advanced to the great man’s service, whom Mahbub called to his tiny tent to assist in some packing.
‘It is all known to me,’ whispered Kim, bending above saddlebags. ‘Two Sahibs came up on a te rain. I was running to and fro in the dark on this side of the trucks as the te-rain moved up and down slowly. They fell upon two men sitting under this truck—Hajji, what shall I do with this lump of tobacco? Wrap it in paper and put it under the salt-bag? Yes—and struck them down. But one man struck at a Sahib with a fakir’s buck’s horn’ (Kim meant the conjoined blackbuck horns, which are a fakir’s sole temporal weapon)—‘the blood came. So the other Sahib, first smiting his own man senseless, smote the stabber with a short gun which had rolled from the first man’s hand. They all raged as though mad together.’
Mahbub smiled with heavenly resignation. ‘No! That is not so much dewanee [madness, or a case for the civil court—the word can be punned upon both ways] as nizamut [a criminal case]. A gun, sayest thou? Ten good years in jail.’
‘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 money-lender, 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 foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger.’
‘True. True talk,’ said Kim solemnly. ‘Fools speak of a cat when a woman is brought to bed, for instance. I have heard them.’
‘Therefore, in one situate as thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces. Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always remembering thou art—’ He paused, with a puzzled smile.
‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’
‘Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law—or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart. This matter of creeds is like horseflesh. The wise man knows horses are good—that there is a profit to be made from all; and for myself—but that I am a good Sunni210 and hate the men of Tirah211—I could believe the same of all the Faiths. Now manifestly a Kathiawar mare taken from the sands of her birthplace and removed to the west of Bengal founders—nor is even a Balkh stallion (and there are no better horses than those of Balkh, were they not so heavy in the shoulder) of any account in the great Northern deserts beside the snow-camels I have seen. Therefore I say in my heart the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.’
‘But my lama said altogether a different thing.’
‘Oh, he is an old dreamer of dreams from Bhotiyal. My heart is a little angry, Friend of all the World, that thou shouldst see such worth in a man so little known.’
‘It is true, Hajji; but that worth do I see, and to him my heart is drawn.’
‘And his to thine, I hear. Hearts are like horses. They come and they go against bit or spur. Shout Gul Sher Khan yonder to drive in that bay stallion’s pickets more firmly. We do not want a horse-fight at every resting-stage, and the dun and the black will be locked212 in a little.... Now hear me. Is it necessary to the comfort of thy heart to see that lama?’
‘It is one part of my bond,’ said Kim. ‘If I do not see him, and if he is taken from me, I will go out of that madrissah in Nucklao and, and—once gone, who is to find me again?’
‘It is true. Never was colt held on a lighter heel-rope than thou.’ Mahbub nodded his head.
‘Do not be afraid.’ Kim spoke as though he could have evanished on the moment. ‘My lama has said that he will come to see me at the madrissah——’
‘A beggar and his bowl in the presence of those young Sa——’
‘Not all!’ Kim cut in with a snort. ‘Their eyes are blued and their nails are blackened with low-caste blood, many of them. Sons of mehteranees 213—brothers-in-law to the bhungi [sweeper].’
We need not follow the rest of the pedigree; but Kim made his little point clearl
y and without heat, chewing a piece of sugar-cane the while.
‘Friend of all the World,’ said Mahbub, pushing over the pipe for the boy to clean, ‘I have met many men, women, and boys, and not a few Sahibs. I have never in all my days met such an imp as thou art.’
‘And why? When I always tell thee the truth.’
‘Perhaps the very reason, for this is a world of danger to honest men.’ Mahbub Ali hauled himself off the ground, girt in his belt, and went over to the horses.
‘Or sell it?’
There was that in the tone that made Mahbub halt and turn. ‘What new devilry?’
‘Eight annas, and I will tell,’ said Kim, grinning. ‘It touches thy peace.’
‘O Shaitan!’ Mahbub gave the money.
‘Rememberest thou the little business of the thieves in the dark, down yonder at Umballa?’
‘Seeing they sought my life, I have not altogether forgotten. Why?’
‘Rememberest thou the Kashmir Serai?’
‘I will twist thy ears in a moment—Sahib.’
‘No need—Pathan. Only, the second fakir, whom the Sahibs beat senseless, was the man who came to search thy bulkhead at Lahore. I saw his face as they helped him on the engine. The very same man.’
‘Why didst thou not tell before?’
‘Oh, he will go to jail, and be safe for some years. There is no need to tell more than is necessary at any one time. Besides, I did not then need money for sweetmeats.’
‘Allah kerim! ‘214 said Mahbub Ali. ‘Wilt thou some day sell my head for a few sweetmeats if the fit takes thee?’
Kim will remember till he dies that long, lazy journey from Umballa, through Kalka215 and the Pinjore Gardens216 near by, up to Simla. A sudden spate in the Gugger River swept down one horse (the most valuable, be sure), and nearly drowned Kim among the dancing boulders. Farther up the road the horses were stampeded by a Government elephant, and being in high condition of grass food, it cost a day and a half to get them together again. Then they met Sikandar Khan coming down with a few unsaleable screws,217—remnants of his string,—and Mahbub, who has more of horse-coping in his little finger-nail than Sikandar Khan in all his tents, must needs buy two of the worst, and that meant eight hours’ laborious diplomacy and untold tobacco. But it was all pure delight—the wandering road, climbing, dipping, and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti, tier upon tier on the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water-channels; the chatter of the monkeys; the solemn deodars, climbing one after another with down-drooped branches; the vista of the Plains rolled out far beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga-horns and the wild rush of the led horses when a tonga swung round a curve; the halts for prayers (Mahbub was very religious in dry-washings and bellowings when time did not press); the evening conferences by the halting-places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together and the stolid drivers told the news of the Road—all these things lifted Kim’s heart to song within him.