The boy, too, looked healthier, I thought. Certainly he kept cleaner than he had in the livestock-seller’s pens. Holmes had bought him a change of raiment, child-sized pyjama-trousers and buffalo-hide sandals underneath the European-style shirt Bindra had chosen. He went bareheaded, either because of his age or his inclination, and generally bare-footed unless the track was particularly rough, but since he and Holmes had come out of the clothing shop, I had not once seen him without the colourful vest decorated with small chips of mirrored glass held in place with circles of embroidery floss. The shiny specks caught the sun as he dangled on the cart, his brush transforming the entire thing to the colour of the Indian sky an hour after the sun had set, and I had to smile.

“A curious child,” I commented to Holmes. (A distinct advantage of male dress here was that it permitted me to walk closer to Holmes than I could have as a woman, thus allowing us conversations we might not otherwise have had.)

“He has his pride,” my companion answered, and I saw what he meant: Bindra’s vision of our troupe’s dignity did not include a bashed-about wagon.

“What did Kipling call his Kim? ‘Little friend of all the world’?”

“Yes; being all the world’s friend, O’Hara ultimately belonged to no-one. In that respect, the phrase applies to young Bindra. Kim, however, formed his own family as time went on, binding himself to the chosen few irrevocably and utterly. I am not certain that this child has that capacity.”

“He seems to have formed an affection for us—certainly for you.”

“But can you see him hesitating for a moment to drop us if something better came along?”

I could not. The jackdaw-boy, with his fascination for shiny knick-knacks and decorations, was probably just taken by the oddity that we represented, and perhaps by the challenge. “Do you think he’ll try to steal us blind when he goes?” I had been keeping all my valuables on my person, not where he could find them on the cart.

“Oddly enough, I do not. He seems to have a set of standards he holds himself to. If he leaves, he may well help himself to some of our possessions, but only by way of compensation for what wages he considers earned but unpaid. Not more.”

With this reminder of the curious Oriental concept of ethics, back my thoughts circled to the enigma of Kim. “And do you think O’Hara might not have done the same? Was the Survey part of the world with which he was casual friends, or was it family, to which he bound himself irrevocably?”