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