He turned as feeling on the floor beside him and tossed a flap of soft, greasy Mussalman bread to the boy.  ’Go and lie down among my horseboys for tonight — thou and the lama.  Tomorrow I may give thee service.’

Kim slunk away, his teeth in the bread, and, as he expected, he found a small wad of folded tissue-paper wrapped in oilskin, with three silver rupees — enormous largesse.  He smiled and thrust money and paper into his leather amulet-case.  The lama, sumptuously fed by Mahbub’s Baltis, was already asleep in a corner of one of the stalls.  Kim lay down beside him and laughed.  He knew he had rendered a service to Mahbub Ali, and not for one little minute did he believe the tale of the stallion’s pedigree.

But Kim did not suspect that Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab, a wealthy and enterprising trader, whose caravans penetrated far and far into the Back of Beyond, was registered in one of the locked books of the Indian Survey Department as C25 IB.  Twice or thrice yearly C25 would send in a little story, baldly told but most interesting, and generally — it was checked by the statements of R17 and M4 — quite true.  It concerned all manner of out-of-the-way mountain principalities, explorers of nationalities other than English, and the guntrade — was, in brief, a small portion of that vast mass of ’information received’ on which the Indian Government acts.  But, recently, five confederated Kings, who had no business to confederate, had been informed by a kindly Northern Power that there was a leakage of news from their territories into British India.  So those Kings’ Prime Ministers were seriously annoyed and took steps, after the Oriental fashion.  They suspected, among many others, the bullying, red-bearded horsedealer whose caravans ploughed through their fastnesses belly-deep in snow.  At least, his caravan that season had been ambushed and shot at twice on the way down, when Mahbub’s men accounted for three strange ruffians who might, or might not, have been hired for the job.  Therefore Mahbub had avoided halting at the insalubrious city of Peshawur, and had come through without stop to Lahore, where, knowing his country-people, he anticipated curious developments.

And there was that on Mahbub Ali which he did not wish to keep an hour longer than was necessary — a wad of closely folded tissue-paper, wrapped in oilskin — an impersonal, unaddressed statement, with five microscopic pin-holes in one corner, that most scandalously betrayed the five confederated Kings, the sympathetic Northern Power, a Hindu banker in Peshawur, a firm of gun-makers in Belgium, and an important, semi-independent Mohammedan ruler to the south.  This last was R17’s work, which Mahbub had picked up beyond the Dora Pass and was carrying in for R17, who, owing to circumstances over which he had no control, could not leave his post of observation.  Dynamite was milky and innocuous beside that report