Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/374

342 She trotted forth to raise a typhoon off the cook-house, and almost on her shadow rolled in the Babu, robed as to the shoulders like a Roman emperor, jowled like Titus, bare-headed, with new patent leather shoes, in highest condition of fat, exuding joy and salutations.

'By Jove, Mister O'Hara, but I am jolly glad to see you. I will kindly shut the door. It is a pity you are sick. Are you very sick?'

'The papers—the papers from the kilta. The maps and the murasla!' He held out the key impatiently: for the present need on his soul was to get rid of the loot.

'You are quite right. That is correct departmental view to take. You have got everything?'

'All that was handwritten in the kilta I took. The rest I threw down the hill.' He could hear the key's grate in the lock, the sticky pull of the slow-rending oilcloth, and a quick shuffling of papers. He had been annoyed out of all reason by the knowledge that they lay below him through the sick idle days—a burden incommunicable. For that reason the blood tingled through his body, when Hurree, skipping elephantinely, shook hands again.

'This is fine! This is finest! Mister O'Hara! You have—ha! ha—swiped the whole bag of tricks—locks, stocks, and barrels. They told me it was eight months' work gone up the spouts! By Jove, how they beat me! . . . Look, here is the letter from Hilás!' He intoned a line or two of court Persian, which is the language of authorized and unauthorized diplomacy. 'Mister Raja Sahib has just about put his foot in the holes. He will have to explain offeecially how the deuce an' all he is writing love-letters to the Czar. And they are very cunning maps. . . and there is three or four Prime Ministers of these parts implicated by correspondence. By Gad, Sar! The British Government will