Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/201

Rh sole temporal weapon)—'the blood came. So the other Sahib, first smiting his own man senseless, smote the stabber with a short gun which had rolled from the first man's hand. They all raged as though mad together.' Mahbub smiled with heavenly resignation. 'No! That is not so much dewanee (madness, or a case for the civil court—the word can be punned upon both ways) as nigamut ( a criminal case). A gun sayest thou? that is good ten years in jail.'

'Then they both lay still, but I think they were nearly dead when they were put on the te-rain. Their heads moved thus. And there is much blood on the line.'

'I would not have them dead. Jail is the sure place—and assuredly they will give false names, and assuredly no man will see them for a long time. A Pathan would scarcely have done better. They were unfriends of mine. Now quickly with the saddle-bags and the cooking-platter. We will take out the horses and away to Simla.'

Swiftly,—as Orientals understand speed,—with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn. Kim, regarded as Mahbub Ali's favourite by all who wished to stand well with the Pathan, was not called upon to work. They strolled on by the easiest of stages, halting every few hours at a wayside shelter. Very many Sahibs travel along the Kalka road; and, as Mahbub All says, every young Sahib must needs esteem himself a judge of a horse, and, though he be up to his teeth in debt to the money-lender, must make as if to buy. That was the reason that Sahib after Sahib, rolling along in a stage-carriage,