“He eats five times a day, and lances boils for my hinds to save himself from an apoplexy. He is so full of anxiety for thy health that he sticks to the cook-house door and stays himself with scraps. He will keep. We shall never get rid of him.”
“Send him here, mother”—the twinkle returned to Kim’s eye for a flash—“and I will try.”
“I’ll send him, but to chase him off is an ill turn. At least he had the sense to fish the Holy One out of the brook; thus, as the Holy One did not say, acquiring merit.”
“He is a very wise hakim. Send him, mother.”
“Priest praising priest? A miracle! If he is any friend of thine (ye squabbled at your last meeting) I’ll hale him here with horse-ropes and—and give him a caste-dinner afterwards, my son ... Get up and see the world! This lying abed is the mother of seventy devils ... my son! my son!”
She trotted forth to raise a typhoon off the cook-house, and almost on her shadow rolled in the Babu, robed as to the shoulders like a Roman emperor, jowled like Titus, bare-headed, with new patent-leather shoes, in highest condition of fat, exuding joy and salutations.
“By Jove, Mister O’Hara, but I am jolly glad to see you. I will kindly shut the door. It is a pity you are sick. Are you very sick?”
“The papers—the papers from the kilta. The maps and the murasla!” He held out the key impatiently; for the present need on his soul was to get rid of the loot.
“You are quite right. That is correct Departmental view to take. You have got everything?”
“All that was handwritten in the kilta I took. The rest I threw down the hill.” He could hear the key’s grate in the lock, the sticky pull of the slow-rending oilskin, and a quick shuffling of papers. He had been annoyed out of all reason by the knowledge that they lay below him through the sick idle days—a burden incommunicable. For that reason the blood tingled through his body, when Hurree, skipping elephantinely, shook hands again.