Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/234

208 famous drug-box proved useless, though Kim had restocked it at Bombay. Mahbub had business at Quetta, and Kim, as Mahbub admitted, earned his keep, and perhaps a little over, by spending four amazing days as scullion in the house of a fat commissariat sergeant, from whose office-box, in an auspicious moment, he removed a little vellum ledger which he copied out—it seemed to deal entirely with cattle and camel sales—by moonlight, lying behind an outhouse, all through one hot night. Then he returned the ledger to its place, and, at Mahbub's word, left that service, rejoining him six miles down the road, the clean copy in his bosom.

'That soldier is a small fish,' Mahbub Ali explained, 'but in time we shall catch the larger one. He only sells oxen at two prices—one for himself and one for the Government—which I do not think is a sin.'

'But why could not I take away the little book and be done with it?'

'Then he would have been frightened, and he would have told his master—then we should miss, perhaps, a great number of new rifles which seek their way up from Quetta to the north. The game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.'

'Oho!' said Kim, and held his tongue. That was in the monsoon holidays, after he had taken the prize for mathematics. The Christmas holidays he spent—deducting ten days for private amusements—with Lurgan Sahib, where he sat for the most part in front of a roaring wood-fire—Jakko road was four feet deep in snow that year—and—the small Hindu had gone away to be married—helped Lurgan to thread pearls. He made Kim learn whole chapters of the Koran by heart, till he could deliver them with the very roll and cadence of a mullah. Moreover, he told