“So I did when Yankling Sahib twisted his foot beyond Astor. Aha! I have already looked into their baskets—but we will make fair division at Shamlegh. Give him a little more. It is good medicine. Feel! His heart goes better now. Lay his head down and rub a little on the chest. If he had waited quietly while I accounted for the Sahibs this would never have come. But perhaps the Sahibs may chase us here. Then it would not be wrong to shoot them with their own guns, heh?”
“One is paid, I think, already,” said Kim between his teeth. “I kicked him in the groin as we went downhill. Would I had killed him!”
“It is well to be brave when one does not live in Rampur,” said one whose hut lay within a few miles of the Rajah’s rickety palace. “If we get a bad name among the Sahibs, none will employ us as shikarris any more.”
“Oh, but these are not Angrezi Sahibs—not merry-minded men like Fostum Sahib or Yankling Sahib. They are foreigners—they cannot speak Angrezi as do Sahibs.”
Here the lama coughed and sat up, groping for the rosary.
“There shall be no killing,” he murmured. “Just is the Wheel! Evil on evil—”
“Nay, Holy One. We are all here.” The Ao-chung man timidly patted his feet. “Except by thy order, no one shall be slain. Rest awhile. We will make a little camp here, and later, as the moon rises, we go to Shamlegh-under-the-Snow.”
“After a blow,” said a Spiti man sententiously, “it is best to sleep.”
“There is, as it were, a dizziness at the back of my neck, and a pinching in it. Let me lay my head on thy lap, chela. I am an old man, but not free from passion ... We must think of the Cause of Things.”
“Give him a blanket. We dare not light a fire lest the Sahibs see.”