![]() ![]() ![]() The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three- year-old baby. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway, and his regiment went home without him. The half- caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister but his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. Though he was burned black as any native though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar Kim was white-a poor white of the very poorest. ![]() There was some justification for Kim,-he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the trunnions,-since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon,' hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot. HE sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam- Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher-the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. ![]()
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