‘I said it; I said it,’ cried the bearer of that burden.  ’Thinkest thou it will betray us?’

’Not if it be given to me.  I can draw out its magic.  Otherwise it will do great harm.’

‘A priest always takes his share.’  Whisky was demoralizing the Ao-chung man.

‘It is no matter to me.’  Kim answered, with the craft of his mother-country.  ‘Share it among you, and see what comes!’

’Not I. I was only jesting.  Give the order.  There is more than enough for us all.  We go our way from Shamlegh in the dawn.’

They arranged and re-arranged their artless little plans for another hour, while Kim shivered with cold and pride.  The humour of the situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul.  Here were the emissaries of the dread Power of the North, very possibly as great in their own land as 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.