Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/156

132 of fluent horse-dealer who wears English boots and spurs.) Kim drew his own conclusions from that betrayal. 'That was a small matter. It lay on the straight road to Benares. I and the Sahib have by this time forgotten it. I send so many letters and messages to men who ask questions about horses, I cannot well remember one from the other. Was it some matter of a bay mare that Peters Sahib wished the pedigree of?'

Kim saw the trap at once. If he had said 'bay mare' Mahbub would have known by his very readiness to fall in with the amendment that the boy suspected something. Kim replied therefore:

'Bay mare. No. I do not forget my messages thus. It was a white stallion.'

'Ay, so it was. A white Arab stallion. But thou didst write bay mare to me.'

'Who cares to tell truth to a letter-writer?' Kim answered, feeling Mahbub's palm on his heart.

'Hi! Mahbub, you old villian, pull up!' cried a voice, and an Englishman raced alongside on a little polo-pony. 'I've been chasing you half over the maidan. That Cabuli of yours can go. For sale, I suppose?'

'Aha,' said Mahbub, smoothly reeling out the old, old lie in the vernacular, 'goes in a cart: carries a lady and'

'Plays polo and waits at table. Yes. We know all that. What the deuce have you got there?'

'A boy,' said Mahbub gravely. 'He was being beaten by another boy. His father was once a white soldier in the big war' (Mahbub meant the Afghan war of '79). 'The boy was a child in Lahore city. He played with my horses when he was a babe. Now I think they will make him a soldier. He has been newly caught by his father's regiment that went up to the war last week.