About the same hour Kim heard soft feet in Mahbub"s deserted stall. The horse-trader, curiously enough, had left his door unlocked, and his men were busy celebrating their return to India with a whole sheep of Mahbub"s bounty. A sleek young gentleman from Delhi, armed with a bunch of keys which the Flower had unshackled from the senseless one"s belt, went through every single box, bundle, mat, and saddle-bag in Mahbub"s possession even more systematically than the Flower and the pundit were searching the owner.
"And I think." said the Flower scornfully an hour later, one rounded elbow on the snoring carca.s.s, "that he is no more than a pig of an Afghan horse-dealer, with no thought except women and horses. Moreover, he may have sent it away by now - if ever there were such a thing."
"Nay - in a matter touching Five Kings it would be next his black heart," said the pundit. "Was there nothing?"
The Delhi man laughed and resettled his turban as he entered. "I searched between the soles of his slippers as the Flower searched his clothes. This is not the man but another. I leave little unseen."
"They did not say he was the very man," said the pundit thoughtfully. "They said, "Look if he be the man, since our counsels are troubled.""
"That North country is full of horse-dealers as an old coat of lice. There is Sikandar Khan, Nur Ali Beg, and Farrukh Shah all heads of kafilas [caravans] - who deal there," said the Flower.
"They have not yet come in," said the pundit. "Thou must ensnare them later."
Phew!" said the Flower with deep disgust, rolling Mahbub"s head from her lap. "I earn my money. Farrukh Shah is a bear, Ali Beg a swashbuckler, and old Sikandar Khan - yaie! Go! I sleep now. This swine will not stir till dawn."
When Mahbub woke, the Flower talked to him severely on the sin of drunkenness. Asiatics do not wink when they have outmanoeuvred an enemy, but as Mahbub Ali cleared his throat, tightened his belt, and staggered forth under the early morning stars, he came very near to it.
"What a colt"s trick!" said he to himself. "As if every girl in Peshawur did not use it! But "twas prettily done. Now G.o.d He knows how many more there be upon the Road who have orders to test me - perhaps with the knife. So it stands that the boy must go to Umballa - and by rail - for the writing is something urgent. I abide here, following the Flower and drinking wine as an Afghan coper should."
He halted at the stall next but one to his own. His men lay there heavy with sleep. There was no sign of Kim or the lama.
"Up!" He stirred a sleeper. "Whither went those who lay here last even - the lama and the boy? Is aught missing?"
"Nay," grunted the man, "the old madman rose at second c.o.c.kcrow saying he would go to Benares, and the young one led him away."
"The curse of Allah on all unbelievers!" said Mahbub heartily, and climbed into his own stall, growling in his beard.
But it was Kim who had wakened the lama - Kim with one eye laid against a knot-hole in the planking, who had seen the Delhi man"s search through the boxes. This was no common thief that turned over letters, bills, and saddles - no mere burglar who ran a little knife sideways into the soles of Mahbub"s slippers, or picked the seams of the saddle-bags so deftly. At first Kim had been minded to give the alarm - the long-drawn choor - choor! [thief! thief!] that sets the serai ablaze of nights; but he looked more carefully, and, hand on amulet, drew his own conclusions.
"It must be the pedigree of that made-up horse-lie," said he, "the thing that I carry to Umballa. Better that we go now. Those who search bags with knives may presently search bellies with knives. Surely there is a woman behind this. Hai! Hai! in a whisper to the light-sleeping old man. "Come. It is time - time to go to Benares."
The lama rose obediently, and they pa.s.sed out of the serai like shadows.
Chapter 2.
And whoso will, from Pride released; Contemning neither creed nor priest, May feel the Soul of all the East. About him at Kamakura.
Buddha at Kamakura.
They entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night; the electrics sizzling over the goods-yard where they handle the heavy Northern grain-traffic.
"This is the work of devils!" said the lama, recoiling from the hollow echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms, and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic stone hall paved, it seemed, with the sheeted dead third-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers who had taken their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their pa.s.senger traffic is regulated accordingly.
"This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that hole" - Kim pointed to the ticket-office - "who will give thee a paper to take thee to Umballa."
"But we go to Benares," he replied petulantly.
"All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!"
"Take thou the purse."
The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as the 3.25 a.m. south-bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.
"It is the train - only the te-rain. It will not come here. Wait!" Amazed at the lama"s immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag full of rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy clerk grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six miles distant.
"Nay," said Kim, scanning it with a grin. "This may serve for farmers, but I live in the city of Lah.o.r.e. It was cleverly done, Babu. Now give the ticket to Umballa."
The Babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.
"Now another to Amritzar," said Kim, who had no notion of spending Mahbub Ali"s money on anything so crude as a paid ride to Umballa. "The price is so much. The small money in return is just so much. I know the ways of the te-rain ... Never did yogi need chela as thou dost," he went on merrily to the bewildered lama. "They would have flung thee out at Mian Mir but for me. This way! Come!" He returned the money, keeping only one anna in each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket as his commission - the immemorial commission of Asia.
The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-cla.s.s carriage. "Were it not better to walk?" said he weakly.
A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. "Is he afraid? Do not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the te-rain. Enter! This thing is the work of the Government."
"I do not fear," said the lama. "Have ye room within for two?"
"There is no room even for a mouse," shrilled the wife of a well-to-do cultivator - a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur, district. Our night trains are not as well looked after as the day ones, where the s.e.xes are very strictly kept to separate carriages.
"Oh, mother of my son, we can make s.p.a.ce," said the blueturbaned husband. "Pick up the child. It is a holy man, see"st thou?"
"And my lap full of seventy times seven bundles! Why not bid him sit on my knee, Shameless? But men are ever thus!" She looked round for approval. An Amritzar courtesan near the window sniffed behind her head drapery.
"Enter! Enter!" cried a fat Hindu money-lender, his folded account-book in a cloth under his arm. With an oily smirk: "It is well to be kind to the poor."
"Ay, at seven per cent a month with a mortgage on the unborn calf," said a young Dogra soldier going south on leave; and they all laughed.
"Will it travel to Benares?" said the lama.
"a.s.suredly. Else why should we come? Enter, or we are left," cried Kim.
"See!" shrilled the Amritzar girl. "He has never entered a train. Oh, see!"
"Nay, help," said the cultivator, putting out a large brown hand and hauling him in. "Thus is it done, father."
"But - but - I sit on the floor. It is against the Rule to sit on a bench," said the lama. "Moreover, it cramps me."
"I say," began the money-lender, pursing his lips, "that there is not one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples."
"Yea, and with most outrageously shameless ones," said the wife, scowling at the Amritzar girl making eyes at the young sepoy.
"I said we might have gone by cart along the road," said the husband, "and thus have saved some money."
"Yes - and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way. That was talked out ten thousand times."
"Ay, by ten thousand tongues," grunted he.
"The G.o.ds help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of that sort which may not look at or reply to a woman." For the lama, constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of her. "And his disciple is like him?"
"Nay, mother," said Kim most promptly. "Not when the woman is well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry."
"A beggar"s answer," said the Sikh, laughing. "Thou hast brought it on thyself, sister!" Kim"s hands were crooked in supplication.
"And whither goest thou?" said the woman, handing him the half of a cake from a greasy package.
"Even to Benares."
"Jugglers belike?" the young soldier suggested. "Have ye any tricks to pa.s.s the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?"
"Because," said Kim stoutly, "he is holy, and thinks upon matters hidden from thee."
"That may be well. We of the Ludhiana Sikhs" - he rolled it out sonorously -"do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight."
"My sister"s brother"s son is naik (corporal] in that regiment," said the Sikh craftsman quietly. "There are also some Dogra companies there." The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other caste than a Sikh, and the banker t.i.ttered.
"They are all one to me, " said the Amritzar girl.
"That we believe," snorted the cultivator"s wife malignantly.
"Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar with weapons in their hands are, as it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the caste, but beyond that again" - she looked round timidly -"the bond of the Pulton - the Regiment - eh?"
"My brother is in a Jat regiment," said the cultivator. "Dogras be good men."
"Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion," said the soldier, with a scowl at the placid old man in the corner. "Thy Sikhs thought so when our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of eight Afridi standards on the ridge not three months gone."
He told the story of a Border action in which the Dogra companies of the Ludhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl smiled; for she knew the talk was to win her approval.
"Alas!" said the cultivator"s wife at the end. "So their villages were burnt and their little children made homeless?"
"They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?"
"Ay, and here they cut our tickets," said the banker, fumbling at his belt.
The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round. Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was told to get out.
"But I go to Umballa," he protested. "I go with this holy man."
"Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only -"
Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his father and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama"s declining years, and that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage bade the guard be merciful - the banker was specially eloquent here - but the guard hauled Kim on to the platform. The lama blinked - he could not overtake the situation and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the carriage window.
"I am very poor. My father is dead - my mother is dead. O charitable ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?"
"What - what is this?" the lama repeated. "He must go to Benares. He must come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be paid -"
"Oh, be silent," whispered Kim; "are we Rajahs to throw away good silver when the world is so charitable?"
The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles, and it was on her that Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were generous.
"A ticket - a little tikkut to Umballa - O Breaker of Hearts!" She laughed. "Hast thou no charity?"
"Does the holy man come from the North?"
"From far and far in the North he comes," cried Kim. "From among the hills."
"There is snow among the pine-trees in the North - in the hills there is snow. My mother was from Kulu. Get thee a ticket. Ask him for a blessing."
"Ten thousand blessings," shrilled Kim. "O Holy One, a woman has given us in charity so that I can come with thee - a woman with a golden heart. I run for the tikkut."
The girl looked up at the lama, who had mechanically followed Kim to the platform. He bowed his head that he might not see her, and muttered in Tibetan as she pa.s.sed on with the crowd.
"Light come - light go," said the cultivator"s wife viciously.
"She has acquired merit," returned the lama. "Beyond doubt it was a nun."
"There be ten thousand such nuns in Amritzar alone. Return, old man, or the te-rain may depart without thee," cried the banker.
"Not only was it sufficient for the ticket, but for a little food also," said Kim, leaping to his place. "Now eat, Holy One. Look. Day comes!"
Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun. The lama flinched a little as the telegraph-posts swung by.
"Great is the speed of the te-rain," said the banker, with a patronizing grin. "We have gone farther since Lah.o.r.e than thou couldst walk in two days: at even, we shall enter Umballa."
"And that is still far from Benares," said the lama wearily, mumbling over the cakes that Kim offered. They all unloosed their bundles and made their morning meal. Then the banker, the cultivator, and the soldier prepared their pipes and wrapped the compartment in choking, acrid smoke, spitting and coughing and enjoying themselves. The Sikh and the cultivator"s wife chewed pan; the lama took snuff and told his beads, while Kim, cross-legged, smiled over the comfort of a full stomach.
"What rivers have ye by Benares?" said the lama of a sudden to the carriage at large.
"We have Gunga," returned the banker, when the little t.i.tter had subsided.
"What others?"
"What other than Gunga?"
"Nay, but in my mind was the thought of a certain River of healing."
"That is Gunga. Who bathes in her is made clean and goes to the G.o.ds. Thrice have I made pilgrimage to Gunga." He looked round proudly.
"There was need," said the young sepoy drily, and the travellers" laugh turned against the banker.
"Clean - to return again to the G.o.ds," the lama muttered. "And to go forth on the round of lives anew - still tied to the Wheel." He shook his head testily. "But maybe there is a mistake. Who, then, made Gunga in the beginning?"