y doings, he might have been expelled. Once Mahbub and he
went together as far as the beautiful city of Bombay, with three
truckloads of tram-horses, and Mahbub nearly melted when Kim proposed a
sail in a dhow across the Indian Ocean to buy Gulf Arabs, which, he
understood from a hanger-on of the dealer Abdul Rahman, fetched better
prices than mere Kabulis.

He dipped his hand into the dish with that great trader when Mahbub and
a few co-religionists were invited to a big Haj dinner. They came back
by way of Karachi by sea, when Kim took his first experience of
sea-sickness sitting on the fore-hatch of a coasting-steamer, well
persuaded he had been poisoned. The Babu's famous drug-box proved
useless, though Kim had restocked it at Bombay. Mahbub had business at
Quetta, and there Kim, as Mahbub admitted, earned his keep, and perhaps
a little over, by spending four curious 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
unpaid, 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.'

'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 Kim the names and properties of many native dr