Mahbub or Colonel Creighton, suddenly smitten
helpless. One of them, he privately knew, would be lame for a time.
They had made promises to Kings. Tonight they lay out somewhere below
him, chartless, foodless, tentless, gunless--except for Hurree Babu,
guideless. And this collapse of their Great Game (Kim wondered to whom
they would report it), this panicky bolt into the night, had come about
through no craft of Hurree's or contrivance of Kim's, but simply,
beautifully, and inevitably as the capture of Mahbub's fakir-friends by
the zealous young policeman at Umballa.

'They are there--with nothing; and, by Jove, it is cold! I am here
with all their things. Oh, they will be angry! I am sorry for Hurree
Babu.'

Kim might have saved his pity, for though at that moment the Bengali
suffered acutely in the flesh, his soul was puffed and lofty. A mile
down the hill, on the edge of the pine-forest, two half-frozen men--one
powerfully sick at intervals--were varying mutual recriminations with
the most poignant abuse of the Babu, who seemed distraught with terror.
They demanded a plan of action. He explained that they were very lucky
to be alive; that their coolies, if not then stalking them, had passed
beyond recall; that the Rajah, his master, was ninety miles away, and,
so far from lending them money and a retinue for the Simla journey,
would surely cast them into prison if he heard that they had hit a
priest. He enlarged on this sin and its consequences till they bade
him change the subject. Their one hope, said he, was unostentatious
flight from village to village till they reached civilization; and, for
the hundredth time dissolved in tears, he demanded of the high stars
why the Sahibs 'had beaten holy man'.

Ten steps would have taken Hurree into the creaking gloom utterly
beyond their reach--to the shelter and food of the nearest village,
where glib-tongued doctors were scarce. But he preferred to endure
cold, belly-pinch, bad words, and occasional blows in the company of
his honoured employers. Crouched against a tree-trunk, he sniffed
dolefully.

'And have you thought,' said the uninjured man hotly, 'what sort of
spectacle we shall present wandering through these hills among these
aborigines?'

Hurree Babu had thought of little else for some hours, but the remark
was not to his address.

'We cannot wander! I can hardly walk,' groaned Kim's victim.

'Perhaps the holy man will be merciful in loving-ki