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.