Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/19



sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammeh on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammeh, that 'fire-breathing dragon,' hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.

There was some justification for Kim,—he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the trunnions,—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the ticca gharries stand) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment, who afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway, and his regiment went home