thrilled with a boy's pure delight in the Game.
'Turn and look, O Jat!'

'The Gods protect us,' said the hooded Kamboh, emerging like a buffalo
from the reeds. 'But--whither went the Mahratta? What hast thou done?'

Kim had been trained by Lurgan Sahib; E23, by virtue of his business,
was no bad actor. In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there
lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred,
dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes--opium takes quick effect on an
empty stomach--luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs
crossed under him, Kim's brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard
of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. The child buried his face
in his amazed father's arms.

'Look up, Princeling! We travel with warlocks, but they will not hurt
thee. Oh, do not cry ... What is the sense of curing a child one day
and killing him with fright the next?'

'The child will be fortunate all his life. He has seen a great
healing. When I was a child I made clay men and horses.'

'I have made them too. Sir Banas, he comes in the night and makes them
all alive at the back of our kitchen-midden,' piped the child.

'And so thou art not frightened at anything. Eh, Prince?'

'I was frightened because my father was frightened. I felt his arms
shake.'

'Oh, chicken-man!' said Kim, and even the abashed Jat laughed. 'I
have done a healing on this poor trader. He must forsake his gains and
his account-books, and sit by the wayside three nights to overcome the
malignity of his enemies. The Stars are against him.'

'The fewer money-lenders the better, say I; but, Saddhu or no Saddhu,
he should pay for my stuff on his shoulders.'

'So? But that is thy child on thy shoulder--given over to the
burning-ghat not two days ago. There remains one thing more. I did
this charm in thy presence because need was great. I changed his shape
and his soul. None the less, if, by any chance, O man from Jullundur,
thou rememberest what thou hast seen, either among the elders sitting
under the village tree, or in thine own house, or in company of thy
priest when he blesses thy cattle, a murrain will come among the
buffaloes, and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in the corn-bins, and the
curse of our Gods upon thy fields that they may be barren before thy
feet and after thy ploughshare.' This was part of an old curse picked
up from a fakir by the Taksali Gate in the days of Kim's innocenc