. 'Go and lie down among my horseboys
for tonight--thou and the lama. Tomorrow I may give thee service.'

Kim slunk away, his teeth in the bread, and, as he expected, he found a
small wad of folded tissue-paper wrapped in oilskin, with three silver
rupees--enormous largesse. He smiled and thrust money and paper into
his leather amulet-case. The lama, sumptuously fed by Mahbub's Baltis,
was already asleep in a corner of one of the stalls. Kim lay down
beside him and laughed. He knew he had rendered a service to Mahbub
Ali, and not for one little minute did he believe the tale of the
stallion's pedigree.

But Kim did not suspect that Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best
horse-dealers in the Punjab, a wealthy and enterprising trader, whose
caravans penetrated far and far into the Back of Beyond, was registered
in one of the locked books of the Indian Survey Department as C25 IB.
Twice or thrice yearly C25 would send in a little story, baldly told
but most interesting, and generally--it was checked by the statements
of R17 and M4--quite true. It concerned all manner of out-of-the-way
mountain principalities, explorers of nationalities other than English,
and the guntrade--was, in brief, a small portion of that vast mass of
'information received' on which the Indian Government acts. But,
recently, five confederated Kings, who had no business to confederate,
had been informed by a kindly Northern Power that there was a leakage
of news from their territories into British India. So those Kings'
Prime Ministers were seriously annoyed and took steps, after the
Oriental fashion. They suspected, among many others, the bullying,
red-bearded horsedealer whose caravans ploughed through their
fastnesses belly-deep in snow. At least, his caravan that season had
been ambushed and shot at twice on the way down, when Mahbub's men
accounted for three strange ruffians who might, or might not, have been
hired for the job. Therefore Mahbub had avoided halting at the
insalubrious city of Peshawur, and had come through without stop to
Lahore, where, knowing his country-people, he anticipated curious
developments.

And there was that on Mahbub Ali which he did not wish to keep an hour
longer than was necessary--a wad of closely folded tissue-paper,
wrapped in oilskin--an impersonal, unaddressed statement, with five
microscopic pin-holes in one corner, that most scandalously betrayed
the five confederated Kings, the sympathetic North