Kim
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
_faquir_ 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!_ 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 _faquir?_”
“One said to the other, ‘What manner of _faquir_ art thou, to shiver at
a little watching?’”
“Good. Go back to the camp and lie down. I do not die tonight.”
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
tonight’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 of 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 anyone 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 night. _Faquirs_ 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 _faquirs_. 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 _faquirs_. 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-train_. I was running to and fro in the dark on
this side of the trucks as the _te-train_ 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 _faquir’s_ buck’s horn” (Kim meant the conjoined black-buck horns,
which are a _faquir’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-train_. 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
saddle-bags 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—”