`Oah!' said Kim, firmly resolved to cling to his Sahib-dom. `There was a box in the night that gave me bad talk. So I stopped it. Was it your box?'

The man held out his hand.

`Shake hands, O'Hara,' he said. `Yes, it was my box. I keep such things because my friends the Rajahs like them. That one is broken, but it was cheap at the price. Yes, my friends, the Kings, are very fond of toys - and so am I sometimes.'

Kim looked him over out of the corners of his eyes. He was a Sahib in that he wore Sahib's clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the intonation of his English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib. He seemed to understand what moved in Kim's mind ere the boy opened his mouth, and he took no pains to explain himself as did Father Victor or the Lucknow masters. Sweetest of all - he treated Kim as an equal on the Asiatic side.

`I am sorry you cannot beat my boy this morning. He says he will kill you with a knife or poison. He is jealous, so I have put him in the corner and I shall not speak to him today. He has just tried to kill me. You must help me with the breakfast. He is almost too jealous to trust, just now.'

Now a genuine imported Sahib from England would have made a great to-do over this tale. Lurgan Sahib stated it as simply as Mahbub Ali was used to record his little affairs in the North.

The back veranda of the shop was built out over the sheer hillside, and they looked down into their neighbours' chimney- pots, as is the custom of Simla. But even more than the purely Persian meal cooked by Lurgan Sahib with his own hands, the shop fascinated Kim. The Lahore Museum was larger, but here were more wonders - ghost-daggers and prayer-wheels from Tibet; turquoise and raw amber necklaces; green jade bangles; curiously packed incense-sticks in jars crusted over with raw garnets; the devil-masks of overnight and a wall full of peacock-blue draperies; gilt figures of Buddha, and little portable lacquer altars; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in quaint octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes - from Japan of all places in the world, so Lurgan Sahib said; carpets in dusty bales, smelling atrociously, pushed back behind torn and rotten screens of geometrical work; Persian water-jugs for the hands after meals; dull copper incense-burners neither Chinese nor Persian, with friezes of fantastic devils running round them; tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw hide; hairpins of jade, ivory, and plasma; arms of all sorts and kinds, and a thousand other oddments were cased, or piled, or merely thrown into the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table, where Lurgan Sahib worked.

`Those things are nothing,' said his host, following Kim's glance. `I buy them because they are pretty, and sometimes I sell - if I like the buyer's look. My work is on the table - some of it.'

It blazed in the morning light - all red and blue and green flashes, picked out with the vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond here and there. Kim opened his eyes.

`Oh, they are quite well, those stones. It will not hurt them to take the sun. Besides, they are cheap. But with sick stones it is very different.' He piled Kim's plate anew. `There is no one but me can doctor a sick pearl and re-blue turquoises. I grant you opals - any fool can cure an opal - but for a sick pearl there is only me. Suppose I were to die! Then there would be no one... Oh no! You cannot do anything with jewels. It will be quite enough if you understand a little about the Turquoise - some day.'

He moved to the end of the veranda to refill the heavy, porous clay water-jug from the filter.

`Do you want drink?'

Kim nodded. Lurgan Sahib, fifteen feet off; laid one hand on the jar. Next instant, it stood at Kim's elbow, full to within half an inch of the brim - the white cloth only showing, by a small wrinkle, where it had slid into place.