with horror...

Said Kim to Mahbub in Lucknow railway station that evening, above the
luggage-scales: 'I feared lest at the last, the roof would fall upon
me and cheat me. It is indeed all finished, O my father?'

Mahbub snapped his fingers to show the utterness of that end, and his
eyes blazed like red coals.

'Then where is the pistol that I may wear it?'

'Softly! A half-year, to run without heel-ropes. I begged that much
from Colonel Creighton Sahib. At twenty rupees a month. Old Red Hat
knows that thou art coming.'

'I will pay thee dustoorie [commission] on my pay for three months,'
said Kim gravely. 'Yea, two rupees a month. But first we must get rid
of these.' He plucked his thin linen trousers and dragged at his
collar. 'I have brought with me all that I need on the Road. My trunk
has gone up to Lurgan Sahib's.'

'Who sends his salaams to thee--Sahib.'

'Lurgan Sahib is a very clever man. But what dost thou do?'

'I go North again, upon the Great Game. What else? Is thy mind still
set on following old Red Hat?'

'Do not forget he made me that I am--though he did not know it. Year by
year, he sent the money that taught me.'

'I would have done as much--had it struck my thick head,' Mahbub
growled. 'Come away. The lamps are lit now, and none will mark thee
in the bazar. We go to Huneefa's house.'

On the way thither, Mahbub gave him much the same sort of advice as his
mother gave to Lemuel, and curiously enough, Mahbub was exact to point
out how Huneefa and her likes destroyed kings.

'And I remember,' he quoted maliciously, 'one who said, "Trust a snake
before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan, Mahbub Ali." Now,
excepting as to Pathans, of whom I am one, all that is true. Most true
is it in the Great Game, for it is by means of women that all plans
come to ruin and we lie out in the dawning with our throats cut. So it
happened to such a one.' He gave the reddest particulars.

'Then why--?' Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to the
warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind Azim
Ullah's tobacco-shop. Those who know it call it The Birdcage--it is so
full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings.

The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt
abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless
woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck,
wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heav