Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/180

154 harm to keep you out of mischief. You can go up with young De Castro as far as Delhi.'

Kim considered it in every possible light. He had been diligent, even as the Colonel advised. A boy's holiday was his own property,—of so much the talk of his companions had advised him,—and a barrack school would be Jehannum after St. Xavier's. Moreover this was magic worth anything else he could write. In three months he had discovered how men can speak to each other at a distance at the cost of half an anna and a little knowledge. No word had come from the lama, but there remained Mahbub Ali—Mahbub Ali and the road. Kim yearned for the feel of soft mud squishing up between the toes, as his mouth watered for mutton stewed with butter and cabbages, for rice speckled with strong-scented cardamoms, for the saffron-tinted rice, garlic and onions, and the forbidden greasy sweetmeats of the bazars. They would give him raw beef on a platter at the barrack school, and he must smoke by stealth. But again, he was a Sahib and was at St. Xavier's, and that pig Mahbub Ali. . . . No, he would not test Mahbub's hospitality and yet. . . . He thought it out alone in the dormitory, and came to the conclusion he had been unjust to Mahbub.

The school was empty; the masters, all save two, had gone away. Colonel Creighton's railway pass was in his hand, and Kim puffed himself that he had not spent Colonel Creighton's or Mahbub's money in riotous living. He was still lord of two rupees seven annas. His new bullock-trunk, marked 'K. O'H.,' and bedding-roll lay in the empty sleeping-room. 'Sahibs are always tied to their baggage,' said Kim, nodding at them. 'You will stay here.' He went out into the warm rain, smiling tenderly, and sought a certain house whose outside he had noted down some time before.