Art thou the only beggar in the city ? Thy mother is dead . Thy father is dead . So is it with all of them . Well , well -- ' 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 XXXXX 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 .
Ali Baltis Kim Lahore Mahbub belly-deep flap horseboys minute wad