Tonight they lay out somewhere below him, chartless, foodless, tentless, gunless--except for Hurree Babu, guideless.

And this collapse of their Great Game (Kim wondered to whom they would report it), this panicky bolt into the night, had come about through no craft of Hurree's or contrivance of Kim's, but simply, beautifully, and inevitably as the capture of Mahbub's fakir-friends by the zealous young policeman at Umballa.
'They are there--with nothing; and, by Jove, it is cold! I am here with all their things.

Oh, they will be angry! I am sorry for Hurree Babu.' Kim might have saved his pity, for though at that moment the Bengali suffered acutely in the flesh, his soul was puffed and lofty.

A mile down the hill, on the edge of the pine-forest, two half-frozen men--one powerfully sick at intervals--were varying mutual recriminations with the most poignant abuse of the Babu, who seemed distraught with terror.
They demanded a plan of action.

He explained that they were very lucky to be alive; that their coolies, if not then stalking them, had passed beyond recall; that the Rajah, his master, was ninety miles away, and, so far from lending them money and a retinue for the Simla journey, would surely cast them into prison if he heard that they had hit a priest.