Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/182

156 'Never indeed. But a jest is not money.'

'It is worth much more.'

'Child, thou art beyond all dispute the most shameless son of Shaitan that I have ever known to take up a poor girl's time with this play, and then to say: "Is not the jest enough?" Thou wilt go very far in this world.' She gave the dancing-girls' salutation in mockery.

'All one. Make haste and rough-cut my head.' Kim shifted from foot to foot, his eyes ablaze with mirth as he thought of the fat days before him. He gave the girl four annas, and went down the stairs in the likeness of a low-caste Hindi boy—perfect in every detail. A cookshop was his next point of call, where he feasted with more delight than ever did Haroun al Raschid.

On Lucknow station platform he watched young De Castro, all covered with prickly heat, get into a second-class compartment. Kim patronized a third, and was the life and soul of it. He explained to the company that he was assistant to a juggler who had left him behind sick with fever, and that he would pick up his master at Umballa. As the occupants of the carriage changed, he varied the tale, or adorned it with all the shoots of a budding fancy, the more rampant for being held off native speech so long. In all India that night was no human being so joyful as Kim. At Umballa he got out and headed eastward, plashing over the sodden fields to the village where the old soldier lived.

About this time Colonel Creighton at Simla was advised from Lucknow by wire that young O'Hara had disappeared. Mahbub Ali was up there selling horses, and to him the Colonel confided the affair one morning when they were cantering round the Annandale race-course.

'Oh, that is nothing,' said the horse-dealer. 'Men are like