The day dragged to its weary end.  When he wished to sleep he was instructed how to fold up his clothes and set out his boots; the other boys deriding.  Bugles waked him in the dawn; the schoolmaster caught him after breakfast, thrust a page of meaningless characters under his nose, gave them senseless names and whacked him without reason.  Kim meditated poisoning him with opium borrowed from a barrack-sweeper, but reflected that, as they all ate at one table in public (this was peculiarly revolting to Kim, who preferred to turn his back on the world at meals), the stroke might be dangerous.  Then he attempted running off to the village where the priest had tried to drug the lama —­ the village where the old soldier lived.  But far-seeing sentries at every exit headed back the little scarlet figure.  Trousers and jacket crippled body and mind alike so he abandoned the project and fell back, Oriental-fashion, on time and chance.  Three days of torment passed in the big, echoing white rooms.  He walked out of afternoons under escort of the drummer-boy, and all he heard from his companions were the few useless words which seemed to make two-thirds of the white man’s abuse.  Kim knew and despised them all long ago.  The boy resented his silence and lack of interest by beating him, as was only natural.  He did not care for any of the bazars which were in bounds.  He styled all natives ‘niggers’; yet servants and sweepers called him abominable names to his face, and, misled by their deferential attitude, he never understood.  This somewhat consoled Kim for the beatings.

On the morning of the fourth day a judgement overtook that drummer.  They had gone out together towards Umballa racecourse.  He returned alone, weeping, with news that young O’Hara, to whom he had been doing nothing in particular, had hailed a scarlet-bearded nigger on horseback; that the nigger had then and there laid into him with a peculiarly adhesive quirt, picked up young O’Hara, and borne him off at full gallop.  These tidings came to Father Victor, and he drew down his long upper lip.  He was already sufficiently startled by a letter from the Temple of the Tirthankars at Benares, enclosing a native banker’s note of hand for three hundred rupees, and an amazing prayer to ‘Almighty God’.  The lama would have been more annoyed than the priest had he known how the bazar letter-writer had translated his phrase ‘to acquire merit.’

‘Powers of Darkness below!’ Father Victor fumbled with the note.  ‘An’ now he’s off with another of his peep-o’-day friends.  I don’t know whether it will be a greater relief to me to get him back or to have him lost.  He’s beyond my comprehension.  How the Divil — yes, he’s the man I mean -can a street-beggar raise money to educate white boys?’

Three miles off, on Umballa racecourse, Mahbub Ali, reining a grey Kabuli stallion with Kim in front of him, was saying: