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.

Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India.

His estate at death consisted of three papers--one he called his 'ne varietur' because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate'.

The third was Kim's birth-certificate.

Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man.