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'Ye did; but, Powers o' Darkness, how did ye know? Kim's eyes sparkled. He shut his lips, nodded his head, and looked unspeakable things. The Chaplain moved on through the dust, and privates, sergeants, and subalterns called one another's attention to the boy. The Colonel, at the head of the column, stared at him curiously.
'Stand farther off, beggar! The order was shouted in broken Hindustani by one of the hillmen. 'Huh! 'Since when have the hill-asses owned all Hindustan? The retort was a swift and brilliant sketch of Kim's pedigree for three generations. 'Ah! Kim's voice was sweeter than ever, as he broke the dung-cake into fit pieces. 'In my country we call that the beginning of love-talk.
For aught he knew, and Kim's limitations were as curious and sudden as his expansions, the men, the nine hundred thorough devils of his father's prophecy, might pray to the beast after dark, as Hindus pray to the Holy Cow. That at least would be entirely right and logical, and the padre with the gold cross would be therefore the man to consult in the matter.
This seemed to make Kim's supernatural origin more certain. 'Was not such an one's daughter born then 'And her mother bore her husband four sons in four years all likely boys, cried the cultivator's wife, sitting outside the circle in the shadow.
She haunts lonely roads, her feet are turned backwards on the ankles, and she leads men to torment. Louder rose Kim's quavering howl, till at last he leaped to his feet and staggered off sleepily, while the camp cursed him for waking them. Some twenty yards farther up the line he lay down again, taking care that the whisperers should hear his grunts and groans as he recomposed himself.
"Kim's Bayou! That was a good hiding-place, Mercer!" "A very good place of concealment indeed, sir. As soon as it was dark, Mooie returned to watch. What happened to him I haven't fully discovered, sir. But it must have been near midnight when he staggered up to Crossen's place, bleeding and half out of his senses. They brought him here, and I watched over him most of the night.
This ignorance was well both for Kim's vanity and for the lama's peace of mind, when we think that there was then being handed in at Simla a code-wire reporting the arrival of E23 at Delhi, and, more important, the whereabouts of a letter he had been commissioned to abstract.
On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between pillars monstrous pillars of beauty and strength.
Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim's neck.
Surely he must know that Kim's delivery of the letter to the officer at Umballa had caused the great war which the men and boys had discussed so loudly over the barrack dinner-tables. But if Mahbub Ali did not know this, it would be very unsafe to tell him so. Mahbub Ali was hard upon boys who knew, or thought they knew, too much.
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