Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/220

194 They heaped the tray again with odds and ends gathered from the shop, and even the kitchen, and every time the boy won, till Kim marvelled.

'Bind my eyes—let me feel once with my fingers, and even then I will leave thee open-eyed behind,' he challenged. Kim stamped with vexation when the lad made his boast good.

'If it were men—or horses,' he said, 'I could do better. This playing with tweezers and knives and scissors is too little.'

'Learn first—teach later,' said Lurgan Sahib. 'Is he thy master?'

'Truly. But how is it done?'

'By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly—for it is worth doing.'

The Hindu boy in highest feather actually patted Kim on the back.

'Do not despair,' he said. 'I myself will teach thee.'

'And I will see that thou art well taught,' said Lurgan Sahib, still speaking in the vernacular, 'for except my boy here—it was foolish of thee to buy so much white arsenic when, if thou hadst asked, I could have given it to thee—except my boy here I have not in a long time met with one better worth teaching. And there are ten days more ere thou canst return to Lucknao—where they teach nothing at a long price. We shall, I think, be friends.'

They were a most mad ten days, but Kim enjoyed himself too much to reflect on their craziness. In the morning they played the 'jewel game'—sometimes with veritable stones, sometimes with piles of swords and daggers, sometimes with photographs (in this event Kim won). Through the afternoons he and the Hindu boy would mount guard in the shop, sitting dumb behind a carpet bale or a screen and watching the many and very curious visitors