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Kim

by Rudyard Kipling · English · Gutenberg #35555 · 603,141 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Kim

Author: Rudyard Kipling


        
Release date: March 11, 2011 [eBook #35555]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KIM ***




Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Emmy and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net











KIM




BOOKS BY

RUDYARD KIPLING

    A Book of Words
    Actions and Reactions
    A Kipling Pageant
    Captains Courageous
    Collected Dog Stories
    Collected Verse
    Debits and Credits
    Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads
    Diversity of Creatures
    France at War
    From Sea to Sea
    His Apologies
    If
    Independence
    Just So Song Book
    Just So Stories
    Kim
    Land and Sea Tales
    Letters of Travel
    Life's Handicap: _Being Stories of Mine Own People_
    Limits and Renewals
    Many Inventions
    Plain Tales from the Hills
    Puck of Pook's Hill
    Rewards and Fairies
    Rudyard Kipling's Inclusive Verse, 1885-1932
    Soldier Stories
    Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, and In Black and White
    Songs for Youth
    Songs from Books
    Stalky & Co.
    Supplication of the Black Aberdeen
    The Complete Stalky & Co.
    The Day's Work
    The Eyes of Asia
    The Five Nations
    The Humorous Tales of Rudyard Kipling
    The Irish Guards in the Great War
    The Jungle Book
    The Jungle Book, _Special Illustrated Edition_
    The Kipling Birthday Book
    The Light That Failed
    The Naulahka (_With Wolcott Balestier_)
    The Second Jungle Book
    The Seven Seas
    The Two Jungle Books
    The Years Between
    "Thy Servant A Dog"
    Traffics and Discoveries
    Under the Deodars, the Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie

[Illustration: Kim.]





KIM

Rudyard Kipling

[Illustration]

_Doubleday & Company, Inc._

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK




          COPYRIGHT, 1900, 1901

          BY RUDYARD KIPLING

          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

          CL


          Printed in the United States of America




KIM




CHAPTER I

          'Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way
           By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
           Be gentle when the heathen pray
               To Buddha at Kamakura!'


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. 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.

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. 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. 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. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi
railway, and his regiment went home without him. 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. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they
belonged to a great piece of magic--such magic as men practised over
yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue and white Jadoo-Gher--the
Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come
right some day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between
pillars--monstrous pillars--of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself,
riding on a horse, at the head of the finest regiment in the world,
would attend to Kim,--little Kim that should have been better off than
his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose god was a Red Bull on
a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten
O'Hara--poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line. Then
he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it
came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and
birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round
Kim's neck.

'And some day,' she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies,
'there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the
Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into
English--'nine hundred devils.'

'Ah,' said Kim, 'I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse
will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making ready
the ground for these matters. That is how, my father said, they always
did; and it is always so when men work magic.'

If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers,
he would, of course, have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge and
sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard of
magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held views of his own. As he reached the
years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid missionaries and white men of
serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did. For Kim did
nothing with an immense success. True, he knew the wonderful walled city
of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove
with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed
of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but
missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the
beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was 'Little Friend of all
the World'; and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he executed
commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young
men of fashion. It was intrigue, of course,--he knew that much, as he
had known all evil since he could speak,--but what he loved was the game
for its own sake--the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes,
the crawl up a water-pipe, the sights and sounds of the women's world
on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop
under cover of the hot dark. Then there were holy men, ash-smeared
faquirs by their brick shrines under the trees at the riverside, with
whom he was quite familiar--greeting them as they returned from
begging-tours, and, when no one was by, eating from the same dish. The
woman who looked after him insisted with tears that he should wear
European clothes--trousers, a shirt, and a battered hat. Kim found it
easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged on certain
businesses. One of the young men of fashion--he who was found dead at
the bottom of a well on the night of the earthquake--had once given him
a complete suit of Hindu kit, the costume of a low-caste street boy, and
Kim stored it in a secret place under some baulks in Nila Ram's
timber-yard, beyond the Punjab High Court, where the fragrant deodar
logs lie seasoning after they have driven down the Ravee. When there was
business or frolic afoot, Kim would use his properties, returning at
dawn to the veranda, all tired out from shouting at the heels of a
marriage procession, or yelling at a Hindu festival. Sometimes there was
food in the house, more often there was not, and then Kim went out again
to eat with his native friends.

As he drummed his heels against Zam-Zammah he turned now and again from
his king-of-the-castle game with little Chota Lai, and Abdullah the
sweetmeat-seller's son, to make a rude remark to the native policeman on
guard over rows of shoes at the Museum door. The big Punjabi grinned
tolerantly: he knew Kim of old. So did the water-carrier, sluicing water
on the dry road from his goat-skirt bag. So did Jawahir Singh, the
Museum carpenter, bent over new packing-cases. So did everybody in sight
except the peasants from the country, hurrying up to the Wonder House to
view the things that men made in their own Province and elsewhere. The
Museum was given up to Indian arts and manufactures, and anybody who
sought wisdom could ask the curator to explain.

'Off! Off! Let me up!' cried Abdullah, climbing up Zam-Zammah's wheel.

'Thy father was a pastry-cook, Thy mother stole the ghi,' sang Kim. 'All
Mussalmans fell off Zam-Zammah long ago!'

'Let me up!' shrilled little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap. His
father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the only
democratic land in the world.

'The Hindus fell off Zam-Zammah too. The Mussalmans pushed them off. Thy
father was a pastry-cook--'

He stopped; for there shuffled round the corner, from the roaring Motee
Bazar, such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never
seen. He was nearly six feet high, dressed in fold upon fold of dingy
stuff like horse-blanketing, and not one fold of it could Kim refer to
any known trade or profession. At his belt hung a long open-work iron
pencase and a wooden rosary such as holy men wear. On his head was a
gigantic sort of tam-o'-shanter. His face was yellow and wrinkled, like
that of Fook Shing, the Chinese boot-maker in the bazar. His eyes turned
up at the corners and looked like little slits of onyx.

'Who is that?' said Kim to his companions.

'Perhaps it is a man,' said Abdullah, finger in mouth, staring.

'Without doubt,' returned Kim; 'but he is no man of India that I have
ever seen.'

'A priest, perhaps,' said Chota Lal, spying the rosary. 'See! He goes
into the Wonder House!'

'Nay, nay,' said the policeman, shaking his head. 'I do not understand
your talk.' The constable spoke Punjabi. 'Oh, Friend of all the World,
what does he say?'

'Send him hither' said Kim, dropping from Zam-Zammah, flourishing his
bare heels. 'He is a foreigner, and thou art a buffalo.'

The man turned helplessly and drifted towards the boys. He was old, and
his woollen gaberdine still reeked of the stinking artemisia of the
mountain passes.

'O Children, what is that big house?' he said in very fair Urdu.

'The Ajaib-Gher, the Wonder House!' Kim gave him no title--such as Lala
or Mian. He could not divine the man's creed.

'Ah! The Wonder House! Can any enter?'

'It is written above the door--all can enter.'

'Without payment?'

'I go in and out. I am no banker,' laughed Kim.

'Alas! I am an old man. I did not know.' Then, fingering his rosary, he
half turned to the Museum.

'What is your caste? Where is your house? Have you come far?' Kim asked.

'I came by Kulu--from beyond the Kailas--but what know you? From the
hills where'--he sighed--'the air and water are fresh and cool.'

'Aha! Khitai' (a Chinaman), said Abdullah proudly. Fook Shing had once
chased him out of his shop for spitting at the joss above the boots.

'Pahari?' (a hillman), said little Chota Lal.

'Aye, child--a hillman from hills thou'lt never see. Didst hear of
Bhotiyal (Tibet)? I am no Khitai, but a Bhotiya (Tibetan), since you
must know--a lama--or, say a guru in your tongue.'

'A guru from Tibet,' said Kim. 'I have not seen such a man. They be
Hindus in Tibet, then?'

'We be followers of the Middle Way, living in peace in our lamasseries,
and I go to see the Four Holy Places before I die. Now do you, who are
children, know as much as I do who am old.' He smiled benignantly on the
boys.

'Hast thou eaten?'

He fumbled in his bosom and drew forth a worn wooden begging-bowl. The
boys nodded. All priests of their acquaintance begged.

'I do not wish to eat yet.' He turned his head like an old tortoise in
the sunlight. 'Is it true that there are many images in the Wonder House
of Lahore?' He repeated the last words as one making sure of an address.

'That is true,' said Abdullah. 'It is full of heathen buts. Thou also
art an idolater.'

'Never mind him,' said Kim. 'That is the Government's house and there is
no idolatry in it, but only a Sahib with a white beard. Come with me and
I will show.'

'Strange priests eat boys,' whispered Chota Lal.

'And he is a stranger and a but-parast' (idolater), said Abdullah, the
Mohammedan.

Kim laughed. 'He is new. Run to your mothers' laps, and be safe. Come!'

Kim clicked round the self-registering turnstile; the old man followed
and halted amazed. In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the
Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by
forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the
mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces,
friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded
with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas
and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the
pride of the Museum. In open-mouthed wonder the lama turned to this and
that, and finally checked in rapt attention before a large alto-relief
representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha. The Master
was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply
undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy
of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below were lotus-covered waters
with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged dewas held a wreath
over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted
by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat.

'The Lord! The Lord! It is Sakya Muni himself,' the lama half sobbed;
and under his breath began the wonderful Buddhist invocation:--

          'To Him the Way--the Law--Apart--
          Whom Maya held beneath her heart
          Ananda's Lord--the Bodhisat.'

'And He is here! The Most Excellent Law is here also! My pilgrimage is
well begun. And what work! What work!'

'Yonder is the Sahib,' said Kim, and dodged sideways among the cases of
the arts and manufacture wing. A white-bearded Englishman was looking at
the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him and after some fumbling
drew forth a note-book and a scrap of paper.

'Yes, that is my name,' smiling at the clumsy, childish print.

'One of us who had made pilgrimage to the Holy Places--he is now Abbot
of the Lung-Cho Monastery--gave it me,' stammered the lama. 'He spoke of
these.' His lean hand moved tremulously round.

'Welcome, then, O lama from Tibet. Here be the images, and I am
here'--he glanced at the lama's face--'to gather knowledge. Come to my
office awhile.' The old man was trembling with excitement.

The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the
sculpture-lined gallery. Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack
in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out
to listen and watch.

Most of the talk was altogether above his head. The lama, haltingly at
first, spoke to the curator of his own lamassery, the Suchzen, opposite
the Painted Rocks, four months' march away. The curator brought out a
huge book of photos and showed him that very place, perched on its crag,
overlooking the gigantic valley of many-hued strata.

'Ay, ay!' The lama mounted a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of Chinese
work. 'Here is the little door through which we bring wood before
winter. And thou--the English know of these things? He who is now Abbot
of Lung-Cho told me, but I did not believe. The Lord--the Excellent
One--He has honour here too? And His life is known?'

'It is all carven upon the stones. Come and see, if thou art rested.'

Out shuffled the lama to the main hall, and, the curator beside him,
went through the collection with the reverence of a devotee and the
appreciative instinct of a craftsman.

Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred
stone, puzzled here and there by the unfamiliar Greek convention, but
delighted as a child at each new trove. Where the sequence failed, as in
the Annunciation, the curator supplied it from his mound of
books--French and German, with photographs and reproductions.

Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story,
holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and
here were incidents in the legend of the cousin Devadatta. Here was the
wicked woman who accused the Master of impurity, all confounded; here
was the teaching in the Deer-park; the miracle that stunned the
fire-worshippers; here was the Bodhisat in royal state as a prince; the
miraculous birth; the death at Kusinagara, where the weak disciple
fainted; while there were almost countless repetitions of the meditation
under the Bodhi tree; and the adoration of the alms-bowl was everywhere.
In a few minutes the curator saw that his guest was no mere bead-telling
mendicant, but a scholar of parts. And they went at it all over again,
the lama taking snuff, wiping his spectacles, and talking at railway
speed in a bewildering mixture of Urdu and Tibetan. He had heard of the
travels of the Chinese pilgrims, Fo-Hian and Hwen-Thiang, and was
anxious to know if there was any translation of their record. He drew in
his breath as he turned helplessly over the pages of Beal and Stanislas
Julien. ''Tis all here. A treasure locked.' Then he composed himself
reverently to listen to fragments, hastily rendered into Urdu. For the
first time he heard of the labours of European scholars, who by the help
of these and a hundred other documents have identified the Holy Places
of Buddhism. Then he was shown a mighty map, spotted and traced with
yellow. The brown finger followed the curator's pencil from point to
point. Here was Kapilavastu, here the Middle Kingdom, and here Mahabodi,
the Mecca of Buddhism; and here was Kusinagara, sad place of the Holy
One's death. The old man bowed his head over the sheets in silence for a
while, and the curator lit another pipe. Kim had fallen asleep. When he
waked, the talk, still in spate, was more within his comprehension.

'And thus it was, O Fountain of Wisdom, that I decided to go to the Holy
Places which His foot had trod--to the Birth-place, even to Kapila; then
to Maha Bodhi, which is Buddh Gaya--to the Monastery--to the
Deer-park--to the place of His death.'

The lama lowered his voice. 'And I come here alone. For
five--seven--eighteen--forty years it was in my mind that the Old Law
was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom,
charms, and idolatry. Even as the child outside said but now. Ay, even
as the child said, with but-parasti.'

'So it comes with all faiths.'

'Thinkest thou? The books of my lamassery I read, and they were dried
pith; and the later ritual with which we of the Reformed Law have
cumbered ourselves--that, too, had no worth to these old eyes. Even the
followers of the Excellent One are at feud on feud with one another. It
is all illusion. Ay, maya, illusion. But I have another desire'--the
seamed yellow face drew within three inches of the curator, and the long
forefinger nail tapped on the table. 'Your scholars, by these books,
have followed the Blessed Feet in all their wanderings; but there are
things which they have not sought out. I know nothing,--nothing do I
know,--but I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and
open road.' He smiled with most simple triumph. 'As a pilgrim to the
Holy Places I acquire merit. But there is more. Listen to a true thing.
When our gracious Lord, being as yet a youth, sought a mate, men said,
in His father's court, that He was too tender for marriage. Thou
knowest?'

The curator nodded, wondering what would come next.

'So they made the triple trial of strength against all comers. And at
the test of the Bow, our Lord first breaking that which they gave Him,
called for such a bow as none might bend. Thou knowest?'

'It is written. I have read.'

'And, overshooting all other marks, the arrow passed far and far beyond
sight. At the last it fell; and, where it touched earth, there broke out
a stream which presently became a River, whose nature, by our Lord's
beneficence, and that merit He acquired ere He freed himself, is that
whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.'

'So it is written,' said the curator sadly.

The lama drew a long breath. 'Where is that River? Fountain of Wisdom,
where fell the arrow?'

'Alas, my brother, I do not know,' said the curator.

'Nay, if it please thee to forget--the one thing only that thou hast
not told me. Surely thou must know? See, I am an old man! I ask with my
head between thy feet, O Fountain of Wisdom. We know He drew the bow! We
know the arrow fell! We know the stream gushed! Where, then, is the
River? My dream told me to find it. So I came. I am here. But where is
the River?'

'If I knew, think you I would not cry it aloud?'

'By it one attains freedom from the Wheel of Things,' the lama went on,
unheeding. 'The River of the Arrow! Think again! Some little stream, may
be--dried in the heats? But the Holy One would never so cheat an old
man.'

'I do not know. I do not know.'

The lama brought his thousand-wrinkled face once more a handsbreadth
from the Englishman's. 'I see thou dost not know. Not being of the Law,
the matter is hid from thee.'

'Ay--hidden--hidden.'

'We are both bound, thou and I, my brother. But I'--he rose with a sweep
of the soft thick drapery--'I go to cut myself free. Come also!'

'I am bound,' said the curator. 'But whither goest thou?'

'First to Kashi (Benares): where else? There I shall meet one of the
pure faith in a Jain temple of that city. He also is a Seeker in secret,
and from him haply I may learn. May be he will go with me to Buddh Gaya.
Thence north and west to Kapilavastu, and there will I seek for the
River. Nay, I will seek everywhere as I go--for the place is not known
where the arrow fell.'

'And how wilt thou go? It is a far cry to Delhi, and farther to
Benares.'

'By road and the trains. From Pathankot, having left the Hills, I came
hither in a te-rain. It goes swiftly. At first I was amazed to see those
tall poles by the side of the road snatching up and snatching up their
threads,'--he illustrated the stoop and whirl of a telegraph-pole
flashing past the train. 'But later, I was cramped and desired to walk,
as I am used.'

'And thou art sure of thy road?' said the curator.

'Oh, for that one but asks a question and pays money, and the appointed
persons despatch all to the appointed place. That much I knew in my
lamassery from sure report,' said the lama proudly.

'And when dost thou go?' The curator smiled at the mixture of old-world
piety and modern progress that is the note of India to-day.

'As soon as may be. I follow the places of His life till I come to the
River of the Arrow. There is, moreover, a written paper of the hours of
the trains that go south.'

'And for food?' Lamas, as a rule, have good store of money somewhere
about them, but the curator wished to make sure.

'For the journey, I take up the Master's begging-bowl. Yes. Even as He
went so go I, forsaking the ease of my monastery. There was with me when
I left the hills a chela (disciple) who begged for me as the Rule
demands, but halting in Kulu awhile a fever took him and he died. I have
now no chela, but I will take the alms-bowl and thus enable the
charitable to acquire merit.' He nodded his head valiantly.

Learned doctors of a lamassery do not beg, but the lama was an
enthusiast in this quest.

'Be it so,' said the curator, smiling. 'Suffer me now to acquire merit.
We be craftsmen together, thou and I. Here is a new book of white
English paper: here be sharpened pencils two and three--thick and thin,
all good for a scribe. Now lend me thy spectacles.'

The curator looked through them. They were heavily scratched, but the
power was almost exactly that of his own pair, which he slid into the
lama's hand, saying: 'Try these.'

'A feather! A very feather upon the face!' The old man turned his head
delightedly and wrinkled up his nose. 'How scarcely do I feel them! How
clearly do I see!'

'They be bilaur--crystal and will never scratch. May they help thee to
thy River, for they are thine.'

'I will take them and the pencils and the white note-book,' said the
lama, 'as a sign of friendship between priest and priest--and now'--he
fumbled at his belt, detached the open iron-work pencase, and laid it on
the curator's table. 'That is for a memory between thee and me--my
pencase. It is something old--even as I am.'

It was a piece of ancient design, Chinese, of an iron that is not
smelted these days; and the collector's heart in the curator's bosom had
gone out to it from the first. For no persuasion would the lama resume
his gift.

'When I return, having found the River, I will bring thee a written
picture of the Padma Samthora--such as I used to make on silk at the
lamassery. Yes--and of the Wheel of Life,' he chuckled, 'for we be
craftsmen together, thou and I.'

The curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still
have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures which
are, as it were, half written and half drawn. But the lama strode out,
head high in air, and pausing an instant before the great statue of a
Bodhisat in meditation, brushed through the turnstiles.

Kim followed like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly.
This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to
investigate further: precisely as he would have investigated a new
building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove,
and he purposed to take possession. Kim's mother had been Irish too.

The old man halted by Zam-Zammah and looked round till his eye fell on
Kim. The inspiration of his pilgrimage had left him for a while, and he
felt old, forlorn, and very empty.

'Do not sit under that gun,' said the policeman loftily.

'Huh! Owl!' was Kim's retort on the lama's behalf. 'Sit under that gun
if it please thee. When didst thou steal the milk-woman's slippers,
Dunnoo?'

That was an utterly unfounded charge sprung on the spur of the moment,
but it silenced Dunnoo, who knew that Kim's clear yell could call up
legions of bad bazar boys if need arose.

'And whom didst thou worship within?' said Kim affably, squatting in the
shade beside the lama.

'I worshipped none, child. I bowed before the Excellent Law.'

Kim accepted this new god without emotion. He knew already a few score.

'And what dost thou do?'

'I beg. I remember now it is long since I have eaten or drunk. What is
the custom of charity in this town? In silence, as we do of Tibet, or
speaking aloud?'

'Those who beg in silence starve in silence,' said Kim, quoting a
native proverb. The lama tried to rise, but sank back again, sighing for
his disciple, dead in far-away Kulu. Kim watched--head to one side,
considering and interested.

'Give me the bowl. I know the people of this city--all who are
charitable. Give, and I will bring it back filled.'

Simply as a child the old man handed him the bowl.

'Rest thou. I know the people.'

He trotted off to the open shop of a kunjri, a low-caste
vegetable-seller, which lay opposite the belt-tramway line down the
Motee Bazar. She knew Kim of old.

'Oho, hast thou turned yogi with thy begging-bowl?' she cried.

'Nay,' said Kim proudly. 'There is a new priest in the city--a man such
as I have never seen.'

'Old priest--young tiger,' said the woman angrily. 'I am tired of new
priests! They settle on our wares like flies. Is the father of my son a
well of charity to give to all who ask?'

'No,' said Kim. 'Thy man is rather yagi (bad-tempered) than yogi (a holy
man). But this priest is new. The Sahib in the Wonder House has talked
to him like a brother. O my mother, fill me this bowl. He waits.'

'That bowl indeed! That cow-bellied basket! Thou hast as much grace as
the holy bull of Shiv. He has taken the best of a basket of onions
already, this morn; and forsooth, I must fill thy bowl. He comes here
again.'

The huge, mouse-coloured Brahminee bull of the ward was shouldering his
way through the many-coloured crowd, a stolen plantain hanging out of
his mouth. He headed straight for the shop, well knowing his privileges
as a sacred beast, lowered his head, and puffed heavily along the line
of baskets ere making his choice. Up flew Kim's hard little heel and
caught him on his moist blue nose. He snorted indignantly, and walked
away across the tram rails, his hump quivering with rage.

'See! I have saved more than the bowl will cost thrice over. Now,
mother, a little rice and some dried fish atop--yes, and some vegetable
curry.'

A growl came out of the back of the shop, where a man lay.

'He drove away the bull,' said the woman in an undertone. 'It is good to
give to the poor.' She took the bowl and returned it full of hot rice.

'But my yogi is not a cow,' said Kim gravely, making a hole with his
fingers in the top of the mound. 'A little curry is good, and a fried
cake, and a morsel of conserve would please him, I think.'

'It is a hole as big as thy head,' said the woman fretfully. But she
filled it, none the less, with good, steaming vegetable curry, clapped a
dried cake atop, and a morsel of clarified butter on the cake, dabbed a
lump of sour tamarind conserve at the side; and Kim looked at the load
lovingly.

'That is good. When I am in the bazar the bull shall not come to this
house. He is a bold beggarman.'

'And thou?' laughed the woman. 'But speak well of bulls. Hast thou not
told me that some day a Red Bull will come out of a field to help thee?
Now hold all straight and ask for the holy man's blessing upon me.
Perhaps, too, he knows a cure for my daughter's sore eyes. Ask him that
also, O thou Little Friend of all the World.'

But Kim had danced off ere the end of the sentence, dodging pariah dogs
and hungry acquaintances.

'Thus do we beg who know the way of it,' said he proudly to the lama,
who opened his eyes at the contents of the bowl. 'Eat now and--I will
eat with thee. Ohe bhistie!' he called to the water-carrier, sluicing
the crotons by the Museum. 'Give water here. We men are thirsty.'

'We men!' said the bhistie, laughing. 'Is one skinful enough for such a
pair? Drink then, in the name of the Compassionate.'

He loosed a thin stream into Kim's hands, who drank native fashion; but
the lama must needs pull out a cup from his inexhaustible upper
draperies and drink ceremonially.

'Pardesi' (a foreigner), Kim explained, as the old man delivered in an
unknown tongue what was evidently a blessing.

They ate together in great content, clearing the beggar's bowl. Then the
lama took snuff from a portentous wooden snuff-gourd, fingered his
rosary awhile, and so dropped into the easy sleep of age, as the shadow
of Zam-Zammah grew long.

Kim loafed over to the nearest tobacco-seller, a rather lively young
Mohammedan woman, and begged a rank cigar of the brand that they sell to
students of the Punjab University who copy English customs. Then he
smoked and thought, knees to chin, under the belly of the gun, and the
outcome of his thoughts was a sudden and stealthy departure in the
direction of Nila Ram's timber-yard.

The lama did not wake till the evening life of the city had begun with
lamp-lighting and the return of white-robed clerks and subordinates
from the Government offices. He stared dizzily in all directions, but
none looked at him save a Hindu urchin in a dirty turban and
Isabella-coloured clothes. Suddenly he bowed his head on his knees and
wailed.

'What is this?' said the boy, standing before him. 'Hast thou been
robbed?'

'It is my new chela (my disciple) that is gone away from me, and I know
not where he is.'

'And what like of man was thy disciple?'

'It was a boy who came to me in place of him who died, on account of the
merit which I had gained when I bowed before the Law within there.' He
pointed towards the Museum. 'He came upon me to show me a road which I
had lost. He led me into the Wonder House, and by his talk emboldened to
speak to the Keeper of the Images, so that I was cheered and made
strong. And when I was faint with hunger he begged for me, as would a
chela for his teacher. Suddenly was he sent. Suddenly has he gone away.
It was in my mind to have taught him the Law upon the road to Benares.'

Kim stood amazed at this, because he had overheard the talk in the
Museum, and knew that the old man was speaking the truth, which is a
thing a native on the road seldom presents to a stranger.

'But I see now that he was but sent for a purpose. By this I know that I
shall find a certain River for which I seek.'

'The River of the Arrow?' said Kim, with a superior smile.

'Is this yet another Sending?' cried the lama. 'To none have I spoken of
my search, save to the Priest of the Images. Who art thou?'

'Thy chela,' said Kim simply, sitting on his heels. 'I have never seen
any one like to thee in all this my life. I go with thee to Benares.
And, too, I think that so old a man as thou, speaking the truth to
chance-met people at dusk, is in great need of a disciple.'

'But the River--the River of the Arrow?'

'Oh, that I heard when thou wast speaking to the Englishman. I lay
against the door.'

The lama sighed. 'I thought thou hadst been a guide permitted. Such
things fall sometimes--but I am not worthy. Thou dost not, then, know of
the River?'

'Not I.' Kim laughed uneasily. 'I go to look for--for a bull--a Red Bull
on a green field who shall help me.' Boylike, if an acquaintance had a
scheme, Kim was quite ready with one of his own; and, boylike, he had
really thought for as much as twenty minutes at a time of his father's
prophecy.

'To what, child?' said the lama.

'God knows, but so my father told me. I heard thy talk in the Wonder
House of all those new strange places in the Hills, and if one so old
and so little--so used to truth-telling--may go out for the small matter
of a river, it seemed to me that I too must go a-travelling. If it is
our fate to find those things we shall find them--thou, thy River; and
I, my Bull, and the strong Pillars and some other matters that I
forget.'

'It is not pillars but a Wheel from which I would be free,' said the
lama.

'That is all one. Perhaps they will make me a king,' said Kim, serenely
prepared for anything.

'I will teach thee other and better desires upon the road,' the lama
replied in the voice of authority. 'Let us go to Benares.'

'Not by night. Thieves are abroad. Wait till the day.'

'But there is no place to sleep.' The old man was used to the order of
his monastery, and though he slept on the ground, as the Rule decrees,
preferred a decency in these things.

'We shall get good lodging at the Kashmir Serai,' said Kim, laughing at
his perplexity. 'I have a friend there. Come!'

The hot and crowded bazars blazed with light as they made their way
through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned
through it like a man in a dream. It was his first experience of a large
manufacturing city, and the crowded tram-car with its continually
squealing brakes frightened him. Half pushed, half towed, he arrived at
the high gate of the Kashmir Serai: that huge open square over against
the railway station, surrounded with arched cloisters where the camel
and horse caravans put up on their return from Central Asia. Here were
all manner of Northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling
camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles; drawing water for the
evening meal at the creaking well-windlasses; piling grass before the
shrieking, wild-eyed stallions; cuffing the surly caravan dogs; paying
off camel-drivers; taking on new grooms; swearing, shouting, arguing,
and chaffering in the packed square. The cloisters, reached by three or
four masonry steps, made a haven of refuge around this turbulent sea.
Most of them were rented to traders, as we rent the arches of a viaduct;
the space between pillar and pillar being bricked or boarded off into
rooms, which were guarded by heavy wooden doors and cumbrous native
padlocks. Locked doors showed that the owner was away, and a few
rude--sometimes very rude--chalk or paint scratches told where he had
gone. Thus: 'Lutuf Ullah is gone to Kurdistan.' Below, in coarse verse:
'O Allah, who sufferest lice to live on the coat of a Kabuli, why hast
thou allowed this louse Lutuf to live so long?'

Kim, fending the lama between excited men and excited beasts, sidled
along the cloisters to the far end, nearest the railway station, where
Mahbub Ali, the horsetrader, lived when he came in from that mysterious
land beyond the Passes of the North.

Kim had had many dealings with Mahbub in his little life,--especially
between his tenth and his thirteenth year,--and the big burly Afghan,
his beard dyed scarlet with lime (for he was elderly and did not wish
his gray hairs to show), knew the boy's value as a gossip. Sometimes he
would tell Kim to watch a man who had nothing whatever to do with
horses: to follow him for one whole day and report every soul with whom
he talked. Kim would deliver himself of his tale at evening, and Mahbub
would listen without a word or gesture. It was intrigue of some kind,
Kim knew; but its worth lay in saying nothing whatever to any one except
Mahbub, who gave him beautiful meals all hot from the cookshop at the
head of the serai, and once as much as eight annas in money.

'He is here,' said Kim, hitting a bad-tempered camel on the nose. 'Ohe,
Mahbub Ali!' He halted at a dark arch and slipped behind the bewildered
lama.

The horse-trader, his deep, embroidered Bokhariot belt unloosed, was
lying on a pair of silk carpet saddle-bags, pulling lazily at an immense
silver hookah. He turned his head very slightly at the cry; and seeing
only the tall silent figure, chuckled in his deep chest.

'Allah! A lama! A Red Lama! It is far from Lahore to the Passes. What
dost thou do here?'

The lama held out the begging-bowl mechanically.

'God's curse on all unbelievers!' said Mahbub. 'I do not give to a lousy
Tibetan; but ask my Baltis over yonder behind the camels. They may value
your blessings. Oh, horse-boys, here is a countryman of yours. See if he
be hungry.'

A shaven, crouching Balti, who had come down with the horses, and who
was nominally some sort of degraded Buddhist, fawned upon the priest,
and in thick gutturals besought the Holy One to sit at the horse-boys'
fire.

'Go!' said Kim, pushing him lightly, and the lama strode away, leaving
Kim at the edge of the cloister.

'Go!' said Mahbub Ali, returning to his hookah. 'Little Hindu, run away.
God's curse on all unbelievers! Beg from those of my tail who are of thy
faith.'

'Maharaj,' whined Kim, using the Hindu form of address, and thoroughly
enjoying the situation; 'my father is dead--my mother is dead--my
stomach is empty.'

'Beg from my men among the horses, I say. There must be some Hindus in
my tail.'

'Oh, Mahbub Ali, but am I a Hindu?' said Kim in English.

The trader gave no sign of astonishment, but looked under shaggy
eyebrows.

'Little Friend of all the World,' said he, 'what is this?'

'Nothing. I am now that holy man's disciple; and we go a pilgrimage
together--to Benares, he says. He is quite mad, and I am tired of Lahore
city. I wish new air and water.'

'But for whom, dost thou work? Why come to me?' The voice was harsh with
suspicion.

'To whom else should I come? I have no money. It is not good to go about
without money. Thou wilt sell many horses to the officers. They are very
fine horses, these new ones: I have seen them. Give me a rupee, Mahbub
Ali, and when I come to my wealth I will give thee a bond and pay.'

'Um,' said Mahbub Ali, thinking swiftly. 'Thou hast never before lied to
me. Call that lama--stand back in the dark.'

'Oh, our tales will agree,' said Kim laughing.

'We go to Benares,' said the lama, as soon as he understood the drift of
Mahbub Ali's questions. 'The boy and I. I go to seek for a certain
River.'

'Maybe--but the boy?'

'He is my disciple. He was sent, I think, to guide me to that River.
Sitting under a gun was I when he came suddenly. Such things have
befallen the fortunate to whom guidance was allowed. But I remember now,
he said he was of this world--a Hindu.'

'And his name?'

'That I did not ask. Is he not my disciple?'

'His country--his race--his village? Mussalman--Sikh--Hindu--Jain--low
caste or high?'

'Why should I ask? There is neither high nor low in the Middle Way. If
he is my chela--does--will--can any one take him from me? for, look you,
without him I shall not find my River.' He wagged his head solemnly.

'None shall take him from thee. Go, sit among my Baltis,' said Mahbub
Ali, and the lama drifted off, soothed by the promise.

'Is he not quite mad?' said Kim, coming forward to the light again. 'Why
should I lie to thee, Hajji?'

Mahbub puffed his hookah in silence. Then he began, almost whispering:
'Umballa is on the road to Benares--if indeed ye two go there.'

'Tck! Tck! I tell thee he does not know how to lie--as we two know.'

'And if thou wilt carry a message for me as far as Umballa, I will give
thee money. It concerns a horse--a white stallion which I have sold to
an officer upon the last time I returned from the Passes. But
then--stand nearer and hold up hands as begging--the pedigree of the
white stallion was not fully established, and that officer, who is now
at Umballa, bade me make it clear.' (Mahbub here described the horse and
the appearance of the officer.) 'So the message to that officer will be:
"The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established." By this will
he know that thou comest from me. He will then say "What proof hast
thou?" and thou wilt answer: "Mahbub Ali has given me the proof."'

'And all for the sake of a white stallion,' said Kim, with a giggle, his
eyes aflame.

'That pedigree I will give thee now--in my own fashion--and some hard
words as well.' A shadow passed behind Kim, and a feeding camel. Mahbub
Ali raised his voice.

'Allah! Art thou the only beggar in the city? Thy mother is dead. Thy
father is dead. So is it with all of them. Well, well--' he turned as
feeling on the floor beside him and tossed a flap of soft, greasy
Mussalman bread to the boy. 'Go and lie down among my horse-boys for
to-night--thou and the lama. To-morrow I may give thee service.'

Kim slunk away, his teeth in the bread, and, as he expected, he found a
small wad of folded tissue-paper wrapped in oil-skin, with three silver
rupees--enormous largesse. He smiled and thrust money and paper into
his leather amulet-case. 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 C.25.1B.
Twice or thrice yearly C.25 would send in a little story, badly told but
most interesting, and generally--it was checked by the statements of
R.17 and M.4--quite true. It concerned all manner of out-of-the-way
mountain principalities, explorers of nationalities other than English,
and the gun-trade--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. So those Kings' prime
ministers were seriously annoyed and took steps, after the Oriental
fashion. They suspected, among many others, the bullying red-bearded
horse-dealer whose caravans ploughed through their fastnesses belly deep
in snow. At least, his caravan that season had been ambushed and shot at
twice on the way down, when Mahbub's men accounted for three strange
ruffians who might, or might not, have been hired for the job. Therefore
Mahbub had avoided halting at the insalubrious city of Peshawur, and
had come through without stop to Lahore, where, knowing his
country-people, he anticipated curious developments.

And there was that on Mahbub Ali which he did not wish to keep an hour
longer than was necessary--a wad of closely folded tissue-paper, wrapped
in oil-skin--an impersonal, unaddressed statement, with five microscopic
pin-holes in one corner, that most scandalously betrayed the five
confederated Kings, the sympathetic Northern Power, a Hindu banker in
Peshawur, a firm of gun-makers in Belgium, and an important,
semi-independent Mohammedan ruler to the south. This last was R.17's
work, which Mahbub had picked up beyond the Dora Pass and was carrying
in for R.17, who, owing to circumstances over which he had no control,
could not leave his post of observation. Dynamite was milky and
innocuous beside that report of C.25; and even an Oriental, with an
Oriental's views of the value of time, could see that the sooner it was
in the proper hands the better. Mahbub had no particular desire to die
by violence, because two or three family blood-feuds across the border
hung unfinished on his hands, and when these scores were cleared he
intended to settle down as a more or less virtuous citizen. He had never
passed the serai gate since his arrival two days ago, but had been
ostentatious in sending telegrams to Bombay, where he banked some of his
money; to Delhi, where a sub-partner of his own clan was selling horses
to the agent of a Rajputana state; and to Umballa, where an Englishman
was excitedly demanding the pedigree of a white stallion. The public
letter-writer, who knew English, composed excellent telegrams, such
as:--'Creighton, Laurel Bank, Umballa.--Horse is Arabian as already
advised. Sorrowful delayed-pedigree which am translating.' And later to
the same address: 'Much sorrowful delay. Will forward pedigree.' To this
sub-partner at Delhi he wired: 'Lutuf Ullah.--Have wired two thousand
rupees your credit Luchman Narain's bank.' This was entirely in the way
of trade, but every one of those telegrams was discussed and
re-discussed, by parties who conceived themselves to be interested,
before they went over to the railway station in charge of a foolish
Balti, who allowed all sorts of people to read them on the road.

When, in Mahbub's own picturesque language, he had muddied the wells of
inquiry with the stick of precaution, Kim had dropped on him, sent from
heaven; and, being as prompt as he was unscrupulous, Mahbub Ali, used to
taking all sorts of gusty chances, pressed him into service on the spot.

A wandering lama with a low-caste boy-servant might attract a moment's
interest as they wandered about India, the land of pilgrims; but no one
would suspect them or, what was more to the point, rob.

He called for a new light-ball to his hookah, and considered the case.
If the worst came to the worst, and the boy came to harm, the paper
would incriminate nobody. And he would go up to Umballa leisurely
and--at a certain risk of exciting fresh suspicion--repeat his tale by
word of mouth to the people concerned.

But R.17's report was the kernel of the whole affair, and it would be
distinctly inconvenient if that failed to come to hand. However, God was
great, and Mahbub Ali felt he had done all he could for the time being.
Kim was the one soul in the world who had never told him a lie. That
would have been a fatal blot on Kim's character if Mahbub had not known
that to others, for his own ends or Mahbub's business, Kim could lie
like an Oriental.

Then Mahbub Ali rolled across the serai to the Gate of the Harpies who
paint their eyes and trap the stranger, and was at some pains to call on
the one girl who, he had reason to believe, was a particular friend of a
smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit who had waylaid his simple Balti in the
matter of the telegrams. It was an utterly foolish thing to do; because
they fell to drinking perfumed brandy against the Law of the Prophet,
and Mahbub grew wonderfully drunk, and the gates of his mouth were
loosened, and he pursued the Flower of Delight with the feet of
intoxication till he fell flat among the cushions, where the Flower of
Delight, aided by a smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit, searched him from head
to foot most thoroughly.

About the same hour Kim heard soft feet in Mahbub's deserted stall. The
horse-trader, curiously enough, had left his door unlocked, and his men
were busy celebrating their return to India with a whole sheep of
Mahbub's bounty. A sleek young gentleman from Delhi, armed with a bunch
of keys which the Flower had unshackled from the senseless one's belt,
went through every single box, bundle, mat, and saddle-bag in Mahbub's
possession even more systematically than the Flower and the pundit were
searching the owner.

'And I think,' said the Flower scornfully an hour later, one rounded
elbow on the snoring carcase, 'that he is no more than a pig of an
Afghan horse-dealer, with no thought except women and horses. Moreover,
he may have sent it away by now--if ever there were such a thing.'

'Nay--in a matter touching Five Kings it would be next his black heart,'
said the pundit. 'Was there nothing?'

The Delhi man laughed and resettled his turban as he entered. 'I
searched between the soles of his slippers as the Flower searched his
clothes. This is not the man but another. I leave little unseen.'

'They did not say he was the very man,' said the pundit thoughtfully.
'They said, "Look if he be the man, since our councils are troubled."'

'That North country is full of horse-dealers as an old coat of lice.
There is Sikandar Khan, Nur Ali Beg, and Farrukh Shah--all heads of
Kafilas--who deal there,' said the Flower.

'They have not yet come in,' said the pundit. 'Thou must ensnare them
later.'

'Phew!' said the Flower with deep disgust, rolling Mahbub's head from
her lap. 'I earn my money. Farrukh Shah is a bear, Ali Beg a
swashbuckler, and old Sikandar Khan--yaie! Go! I sleep now. This swine
will not stir till dawn.'

When Mahbub woke, the Flower talked to him severely on the sin of
drunkenness. Asiatics do not wink when they have out-manoeuvred an
enemy, but as Mahbub Ali cleared his throat, tightened his belt, and
staggered forth under the early morning stars, he came very near to it.

'What a colt's trick,' said he to himself. 'As if every girl in Peshawur
did not use it! But 'twas prettily done. Now God He knows how many more
there be upon the road who have orders to test me--perhaps with the
knife. So it stands that the boy must go to Umballa--and by rail--for
the writing is something urgent. I abide here, following the Flower and
drinking wine as an Afghan coper should.'

He halted at the stall next but one to his own. His men lay there heavy
with sleep. There was no sign of Kim or the lama.

'Up!' He stirred a sleeper. 'Whither went those who lay here last
even--the lama and the boy? Is aught missing?'

'Nay,' grunted the man; 'the old madman rose at second cockcrow saying
he would go to Benares, and the young one led him away.'

'The curse of Allah on all unbelievers,' said Mahbub heartily, and
climbed into his own stall, growling in his beard.

But it was Kim who had wakened the lama--Kim with one eye laid against a
knot-hole in the planking, who had seen the Delhi man's search through
the boxes. This was no common thief that turned over letters, bills, and
saddles--no mere burglar who ran a little knife sideways into the soles
of Mahbub's slippers, or picked the seams of the saddle-bags so deftly.
At first Kim had been minded to give the alarm--the long-drawn
'cho-or--choor!' (thief! thief!) that sets the serai ablaze of nights;
but he looked more carefully, and, hand on amulet, drew his own
conclusions.

'It must be the pedigree of that made-up horse-lie,' said he, 'the thing
that I carry to Umballa. Better that we go now. Those who search bags
with knives may presently search bellies with knives. Surely there is a
woman behind this. Hai! Hai!' in a whisper to the light-sleeping old
man. 'Come. It is time--time to go to Benares.'

The lama rose obediently, and they passed out of the serai like
shadows.




CHAPTER II

          'For whoso will, from Pride released,
           Contemning neither creed nor priest,
           May hear the Soul of all the East
               About him at Kamakura.'


THEY entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night;
the electrics sizzling over the goods yard where they handle the heavy
Northern grain-traffic.

'This is the work of devils!' said the lama, recoiling from the hollow
echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms,
and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic stone hall paved,
it seemed, with the sheeted dead--third-class passengers who had taken
their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All
hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger
traffic is regulated accordingly.

'This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that
hole'--Kim pointed to the ticket-office--'who will give thee a paper to
take thee to Umballa.'

'But we go to Benares,' he replied petulantly.

'All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!'

'Take thou the purse.'

The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as the
3.25 a. m. south bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the
station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat
vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering
up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.

'It is the train--only the te-rain. It will come here. Wait!' Amazed at
the lama's immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag full of
rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy clerk
grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six miles
distant.

'Nay,' said Kim, scanning it with a grin. 'This may serve for farmers,
but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done, babu. Now give
the ticket to Umballa.'

The babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.

'Now another to Amritzar,' said Kim, who had no notion of spending
Mahbub Ali's money oh anything so crude as a paid ride to Umballa. 'The
price is so much. The small money in return is just so much. I know the
ways of the te-rain. . . . Never did yogi need chela as thou dost,' he
went on merrily to the bewildered lama. 'They would have flung thee out
at Mian Mir but for me. This way! Come.' He returned the money, keeping
only one anna in each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket as his
commission--the immemorial commission of Asia.

The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-class carriage.
'Were it not better to walk?' said he weakly.

A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. 'Is he afraid? Do
not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the te-rain.
Enter! This thing is the work of the Government.'

[Illustration: 'Beggars a plenty have I met, and holy men to boot, but
never such a _yogi_ nor such a disciple.']

'I do not fear,' said the lama. 'Have ye room within for two?'

'There is no room even for a mouse,' shrilled the wife of a well-to-do
cultivator--a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur district. Our night
trains are not as well looked after as the day ones, where the sexes are
very strictly kept to separate carriages.

'Oh, mother of my son, we can make space,' said the blue-turbaned
husband. 'Pick up the child. It is a holy man, see'st thou?'

'And my lap full of seventy times seven bundles! Why not bid him sit on
my knee, Shameless? But men are ever thus!' She looked round for
approval. An Amritzar courtesan near the window sniffed behind her head
drapery.

'Enter! Enter!' cried a fat Hindu money-lender, his folded account-book
in a cloth under his arm. With an oily smirk: 'It is well to be kind to
the poor.'

'Ay, at seven per cent a month with a mortgage on the unborn calf,' said
a young Dogra soldier going south on leave; and they all laughed.

'Will it travel to Benares?' said the lama.

'Assuredly. Else why should we come? Enter, or we are left,' cried Kim.

'See!' shrilled the Amritzar girl. 'He has never entered a train. Oh
see!'

'Nay, help,' said the cultivator, putting out a large brown hand and
hauling him in. 'Thus is it done, father.'

'But--but--I sit on the floor. It is against the Rule to sit on a
bench,' said the lama. 'Moreover, it cramps me.'

'I say,' began the money-lender, pursing his lips, 'that there is not
one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break.
We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.'

'Yea, and with most outrageously shameless ones,' said the wife,
scowling at the Amritzar girl making eyes at the young sepoy.

'I said we might have gone by cart along the road,' said the husband,
'and thus have saved some money.'

'Yes--and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way. That was
talked out ten thousand times.'

'Ay, by ten thousand tongues,' grunted he.

'The Gods help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of that
sort which may not look at or reply to a woman.' For the lama,
constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of her. 'And his
disciple is like him?'

'Nay, mother,' said Kim most promptly. 'Not when the woman is
well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry.'

'A beggar's answer,' said the Sikh, laughing. 'Thou hast brought it on
thyself, sister!' Kim's hands were crooked in supplication.

'And whither goest thou?' said the woman, handing him the half of a cake
from a greasy package.

'Even to Benares.'

'Jugglers belike?' the young soldier suggested. 'Have ye any tricks to
pass the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?'

'Because,' said Kim stoutly, 'he is holy, and thinks upon matters hidden
from thee.'

'That may be well. We of the Loodhiana Sikhs,' he rolled it out
sonorously, 'do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight.'

'My sister's brother's son is naik (corporal) in that regiment,' said
the Sikh craftsman quietly. 'There are also some Dogra companies there.'
The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other caste than a Sikh, and the
banker tittered.

'They are all one to me,' said the Amritzar girl.

'That we believe,' snorted the cultivator's wife malignantly.

'Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar with weapons in their hands are, as
it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the caste, but
beyond that again'--she looked round timidly--'the bond of the
Pulton--the Regiment--eh?'

'My brother is in a Jat regiment,' said the cultivator. 'Dogras be good
men.'

'Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion,' said the soldier, with a
scowl at the placid old man in the corner. 'Thy Sikhs thought so when
our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of
eight Afreedee standards on the ridge not three months gone.'

He told the story of a border action in which the Dogra companies of the
Loodhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl smiled;
for she knew the tale was to win her approval.

'Alas!' said the cultivator's wife at the end. 'So their villages were
burnt and their little children made homeless?'

'They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the
Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?'

'Ay, and here they cut our tickets,' said the banker, fumbling at his
belt.

The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round.
Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete
their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was
told to get out.

'But I go to Umballa,' he protested. 'I go with this holy man.'

'Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only to
Amritzar. Out!'

Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his father
and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama's declining years, and
that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage bade the
guard be merciful,--the banker was specially eloquent here,--but the
guard hauled Kim on to the platform. The lama blinked, he could not
overtake the situation, and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the
carriage window.

'I am very poor. My father is dead--my mother is dead. Oh, charitable
ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?'

'What--what is this?' the lama repeated. 'He must go to Benares. He must
come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be paid--'

'Oh, be silent,' whispered Kim; 'are we Rajahs to throw away good silver
when the world is so charitable?'

The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles, and it was on her that
Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were
generous.

'A ticket--a little tikkut to Umballa--O Breaker of Hearts!' She
laughed. 'Hast thou no charity?'

'Does the holy man come from the North?'

'From far and far in the North he comes,' cried Kim. 'From among the
hills.'

'There is snow among the pine trees in the North--in the hills there is
snow. My mother was from Kulu. Get thee a ticket. Ask him for a
blessing.'

'Ten thousand blessings,' shrilled Kim. 'O Holy One, a woman has given
us in charity so that I can come with thee--a woman with a golden heart.
I run for the tikkut.'

The girl looked up at the lama, who had mechanically followed Kim to the
platform. He bowed his head that he might not see her, and muttered in
Tibetan as she passed on with the crowd.

'Light come--light go,' said the cultivator's wife viciously.

'She has acquired merit,' returned the lama. 'Beyond doubt it was a
nun.'

'There be ten thousand such nuns in Amritzar alone. Return, old man, or
the train may depart without thee,' cried the banker.

'Not only was it sufficient for the ticket, but for a little food also,'
said Kim, leaping to his place. 'Now eat, Holy One. Look. Day comes!'

Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across
the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of
the keen sun. The lama flinched a little as the telegraph-posts swung
by.

'Great is the speed of the train,' said the banker, with a patronising
grin. 'We have gone farther since Lahore than thou couldst walk in two
days: at even, we shall enter Umballa.'

'And that is still far from Benares,' said the lama wearily, mumbling
over the cakes that Kim offered. They all unloosed their bundles and
made their morning meal. Then the banker, the cultivator, and the
soldier prepared their pipes and wrapped the compartment in choking,
acrid smoke, spitting and coughing and enjoying themselves. The Sikh and
the cultivator's wife chewed pan; the lama took snuff and told his
beads, while Kim, cross-legged, smiled over the comfort of a full
stomach.

'What rivers have ye by Benares?' said the lama of a sudden to the
carriage at large.

'We have Gunga,' returned the banker, when the little titter had
subsided.

'What others?'

'What other than Gunga?'

'Nay, but in my mind was the thought of a certain River of healing.'

'That is Gunga. Who bathes in her is made clean and goes to the gods.
Thrice have I made pilgrimage to Gunga.' He looked round proudly.

'There was need,' said the young sepoy drily, and the travellers' laugh
turned against the banker.

'Clean--to return again to the Gods,' the lama muttered. 'And to go
forth on the round of lives anew--still tied to the Wheel.' He shook his
head testily. 'But maybe there is a mistake. Who, then, made Gunga in
the beginning?'

'The Gods. Of what known faith art thou?' the banker said, appalled.

'I follow the Law--the Most Excellent Law. So it was the Gods that made
Gunga. What like of Gods were they?'

The carriage looked at him in amazement. It was inconceivable that any
one should be ignorant of Gunga.

'What--what is thy God?' said the money-lender at last.

'Hear!' said the lama, shifting the rosary to his hand. 'Hear: for I
speak of Him now! O people of Hind, listen!'

He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own
thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of
the Buddha's life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All
India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken
and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and
visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the
end.

'Um!' said the soldier of the Loodhiana Sikhs. 'There was a Mohammedan
regiment lay next to us at the Pirzai Kotal, and a priest of theirs,--he
was, as I remember, a naik,--when the fit was on him, spake prophecies.
But the mad all are in God's keeping. His officers overlooked much in
that man.'

The lama fell back on Urdu, remembering that he was in a strange land.
'Hear the tale of the Arrow which our Lord loosed from the bow,' he
said.

This was much more to their taste, and they listened curiously while he
told it. 'Now, O people of Hind, I go to seek that River. Know ye aught
that may guide me, for we be all men and women in evil case.'

'There is Gunga--and Gunga alone--who washes away sin,' ran the murmur
round the carriage.

'Though past question we have good Gods Jullundur-way,' said the
cultivator's wife, looking out of window. 'See how they have blessed the
crops.'

'To search every river in the Punjab is no small matter,' said her
husband. 'For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices,
and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Homestead.' He shrugged one knotted,
bronzed shoulder.

Think you our Lord came so far north?' said the lama, turning to Kim.

'It may be,' Kim replied soothingly, as he spat red pan-juice on the
floor.

'The last of the Great Ones,' said the Sikh with authority, 'was
Sikander Julkarn (Alexander the Great). He paved the streets of
Jullundur and built a great tank near Umballa. That pavement holds to
this day; and the tank is there also. I never heard of thy God.'

'Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi,' said the young soldier
jestingly to Kim, quoting a Northern proverb. 'That is all that makes a
Sikh.' But he did not say this very loud.

The lama sighed and shrank into himself, a dingy, shapeless mass. In the
pauses of their talk they could hear, the low droning--'Om mane pudme
hum! Om mane pudme hum!'--and the thick click of the wooden rosary
beads.

'It irks me,' he said at last. 'The speed and the clatter irk me.
Moreover, my chela, I think that may be we have overpassed that River.'

'Peace, peace,' said Kim. 'Was not the River near Benares? We are yet
far from the place.'

'But--if our Lord came north, it may be any one of these little ones
that we have run across.'

'I do not know.'

'But thou wast sent to me--wast thou sent to me?--for the merit I had
acquired over yonder at Suchzen. From beside the cannon didst thou
come--bearing two faces--and two garbs.'

'Peace. One must not speak of these things here,' whispered Kim. 'There
was but one of me. Think again and thou wilt remember. A boy--a Hindu
boy--by the great green cannon.'

'But was there not also an Englishman with a white beard--holy--among
images--who himself made more sure my assurance of the River of the
Arrow?'

'He--we--went to the Ajaib-Gher in Lahore to pray before the gods
there,' Kim explained to the openly listening company. 'And the Sahib of
the Wonder House talked to him--yes, this is truth--as a brother. He is
a Very holy man, from far beyond the hills. Rest thou. In time we come
to Umballa.'

'But my River--the River of my healing?'

'And then, if it please thee, we will go hunting for that River on foot.
So that we miss nothing--not even a little rivulet in a field-side.'

'But thou hast a Search of thine own?' The lama--very pleased that he
remembered so well--sat bolt upright.

'Ay,' said Kim, humouring him. The boy was entirely happy to be out
chewing pan and seeing new people in the great good-tempered world.

'It was a Bull--a Red Bull that shall come and help thee--and carry
thee--whither? I have forgotten. A Red Bull on a green field, was it
not?'

'Nay, it will carry me nowhere,' said Kim. 'It is but a tale I told
thee.'

'What is this?' the cultivator's wife leaned forward, her bracelets
clinking on her arm. 'Do ye both dream dreams? A Red Bull on a green
field, that shall carry thee to the Heavens--or what? Was it a vision?
Did one make a prophecy? We have a Red Bull in our village behind
Jullundur city, and he grazes by choice in the very greenest of our
fields!'

'Give a woman an old wife's tale and a weaver-bird a leaf and a thread,
they will weave wonderful things,' said the Sikh. 'All holy men dream
dreams, and by following holy men their disciples attain that power.'

'A Red Bull on a green field, was it?' the lama repeated. 'In a former
life it may be thou hast acquired merit, and the Bull will come to
reward thee.'

'Nay--nay--it was but a tale one told to me--for a jest belike. But I
will seek the Bull about Umballa, and thou canst look for thy River and
rest from the clatter of the train.'

'It may be that the Bull knows--that he is sent to guide us both,' said
the lama, hopefully as a child. Then to the company, indicating Kim:
'This one was sent to me but yesterday. He is not, I think, of this
world.'

'Beggars a plenty have I met, and holy men to boot, but never such a
yogi nor such a disciple,' said the woman.

Her husband touched his forehead lightly with one finger and smiled. But
the next time the lama would eat they took care to give him their best.

And at last--tired, sleepy, and dusty--they reached Umballa City
Station.

'We abide here upon a law-suit,' said the cultivator's wife to Kim. 'We
lodge with my man's cousin's younger brother. There is room also in the
courtyard for thy yogi and for thee. Will--will he give me a blessing?'

'O holy man! A woman with a heart of gold gives us lodging for the
night. It is a kindly land, this land of the South. See how we have been
helped since the dawn!'

The lama bowed his head in benediction.

'To fill my cousin's younger brother's house with wastrels--' the
husband began, as he shouldered his heavy bamboo staff.

'Thy cousin's younger brother owes my father's cousin something yet on
his daughter's marriage-feast,' said the woman crisply. 'Let him put
their food to that account. The yogi will beg, I doubt not.'

'Ay, I beg for him,' said Kim, anxious only to get the lama under
shelter for the night, that he might seek Mahbub Ali's Englishman and
deliver himself of the white stallion's pedigree.

'Now,' said he, when the lama had come to an anchor in the inner
courtyard of a decent Hindu house behind the cantonments, 'I go away for
a while--to--to buy us victual in the bazar. Do not stray abroad till I
return.'

'Thou wilt return? Thou wilt surely return?' The old man caught at his
wrist. 'And thou wilt return in this very same shape? Is it too late to
look to-night for the River?'

'Too late and too dark. Be comforted. Think how far thou art on the
road--an hundred kos from Lahore already.'

'Yea--and farther from my monastery. Alas! It is a great and terrible
world.'

Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own
and a few score thousand other folk's fate slung round his neck. Mahbub
Ali's directions left him little doubt of the house in which his
Englishman lived; and a groom, bringing a dog-cart home from the Club,
made him quite sure. It remained only to identify his man, and Kim
slipped through the garden hedge and hid in a clump of plumed grass
close to the veranda. The house blazed with lights, and servants moved
about tables dressed with flowers, glass, and silver. Presently forth
came an Englishman, dressed in black and white, humming a tune. It was
too dark to see his face, so Kim, beggar-wise, tried an old experiment.

'Protector of the Poor!'

The man backed towards the voice.

'Mahbub Ali says--'

'Hah! What says Mahbub Ali?' He made no attempt to look for the speaker,
and that showed Kim that he knew.

'The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established.'

'What proof is there?' The Englishman switched at the rose-hedge in the
side of the drive.

'Mahbub Ali has given me this proof.' Kim flipped the wad of folded
paper into the air, and it fell on the path beside the man, who put his
foot on it as a gardener came round the corner. When the servant passed
he picked it up, dropped a rupee,--Kim could hear the clink,--and strode
into the house, never turning round. Swiftly Kim took up the money; but,
for all his training, he was Irish enough by birth to reckon silver the
least part of any game. What he desired was the visible effect of
action; so, instead of slinking away, he lay close in the grass and
wormed nearer to the house.

He saw--Indian bungalows are open through and through--the Englishman
return to a small dressing-room, in a corner of the veranda, that was
half-office, littered with papers and despatch-boxes, and sit down to
study Mahbub Ali's message. His face, by the full ray of the kerosene
lamp, changed and darkened, and Kim, used as every beggar must be to
watching countenances, took good note.

'Will! Will, dear!' called a woman's voice. 'You ought to be in the
drawing-room. They'll be here in a minute.'

The man still read intently.

'Will!' said the voice, five minutes later. 'He's come. I can hear the
troopers in the drive.'

The man dashed out bareheaded as a big landau with four native troopers
behind it halted at the veranda, and a tall, black-haired man, erect as
an arrow, swung out, preceded by a young officer who laughed pleasantly.

Flat on his belly lay Kim, almost touching the high wheels. His man and
the black stranger exchanged two sentences.

'Certainly, sir,' said the young officer promptly. 'Everything waits
while a horse is concerned.'

'We shan't be more than twenty minutes,' said Kim's man. 'You can do the
honours--keep 'em amused, and all that.'

'Tell one of the troopers to wait,' said the tall man, and they both
passed into the dressing-room together as the landau rolled away. Kim
saw their heads bent over Mahbub Ali's message, and heard the
voices--one low and deferential, the other sharp and decisive.

'It isn't a question of weeks. It is a question of days--hours almost,'
said the elder. 'I'd been expecting it for some time, but this'--he
tapped Mahbub Ali's paper--'clenches it. Grogan's dining here to-night,
isn't he?'

'Yes, sir, and Macklin too.'

'Very good. I'll speak to them myself. That matter will be referred to
the Council, of course, but this is a case where one is justified in
assuming that we take action at once. Warn the Pindi and Peshawur
brigades. It will disorganise all the summer reliefs, but we can't help
that. This comes of not smashing them thoroughly the first time. Eight
thousand should be enough.'

'What about artillery, sir?'

'I must consult Macklin.'

'Then it means war?'

'No. Punishment. When a man is bound by the action of his predecessor--'

'But C.25 may have lied.'

'He bears out the other's information. Practically, they showed their
hand six months back. But Devenish would have it there was a chance of
peace. Of course they used it to make themselves stronger. Send off
those telegrams at once,--the new code, not the old,--mine and
Wharton's. I don't think we need keep the ladies waiting any longer. We
can settle the rest over the cigars. I thought it was coming. It's
punishment--not war.'

As the trooper cantered off Kim crawled round to the back of the house,
where, going on his Lahore experiences, he judged there would be
food--and information. The kitchen was crowded with excited scullions,
one of whom kicked him.

'Aie,' said Kim, feigning tears. 'I came only to wash dishes in return
for a bellyful.'

'All Umballa is on the same errand. Get hence. They go in now with the
soup. Think you that we who serve Creighton Sahib need strange scullions
to help us through a big dinner?'

'It is a very big dinner;' said Kim, looking at the plates.

'Small wonder. The guest of honour is none other than the Jang-i-Lat
Sahib' (the Commander-in-Chief).

'Ho!' said Kim, with the correct guttural note of wonder. He had learned
what he wanted, and when the scullion turned he was gone.

'And all that trouble,' said he to himself, thinking as usual in
Hindustanee, 'for a horse's pedigree! Mahbub Ali should have come to me
to learn a little lying. Every time before that I have borne a message
it concerned a woman. Now it is men. Better. The tall man said that they
will loose a great army to punish some one--somewhere--the news goes to
Pindi and Peshawur. There are also guns. Would I had crept nearer. It is
big news!'

He returned to find the cultivator's cousin's younger brother discussing
the family law-suit in all its bearings with the cultivator and his wife
and a few friends, while the lama dozed. After the evening meal some one
passed him a water-pipe; and Kim felt very much of a man as he pulled at
the smooth cocoanut-shell, his legs spread abroad in the moonlight, his
tongue clicking in remarks from time to time. His hosts were most
polite; for the cultivator's wife had told them of his vision of the Red
Bull, and of his probable descent from another world. Moreover, the lama
was a great and venerable curiosity. The family priest, an old, tolerant
Sarsut Brahmin, dropped in later, and naturally started a theological
argument to impress the family. By creed, of course, they were all on
their priest's side, but the lama was the guest and the novelty. His
gentle kindliness, and his impressive Chinese quotations, that sounded
like spells, delighted them hugely; and in this sympathetic, simple air
he expanded like the Bodhisat's own lotus, speaking of his life in the
great hills of Suchzen, before, as he said, 'I rose up to seek
enlightenment.'

Then it came out that in those worldly days he had been a master-hand at
casting horoscopes and nativities; and the family priest led him on to
describe his methods; each giving the planets names that the other could
not understand, and pointing upwards as the big stars sailed across the
dark. The children of the house tugged unrebuked at his rosary; and he
clean forgot the Rule which forbids looking at women as he talked of
enduring snows, landslips, blocked passes, the remote cliffs where men
find sapphires and turquoise, and that wonderful upland road that leads
at last into Great China itself.

'How thinkest thou of this one?' said the cultivator aside to the
priest.

'A holy man--a holy man indeed. His Gods are not the Gods, but his feet
are upon the Way,' was the answer. 'And his methods of nativities,
though that is beyond thee, are wise and sure.'

'Tell me,' said Kim lazily, 'whether I find my Red Bull on a green
field, as was promised me.'

'What knowledge hast thou of thy birth-hour?' the priest asked, swelling
with importance.

'Between first and second cockcrow of the first night in May.'

'Of what year?'

'I do not know; but upon the hour that I cried first fell the great
earthquake in Srinagur which is in Kashmir.' This Kim had from the woman
who took care of him, and she again from Kimball O'Hara. The earthquake
had been felt in India, and for long stood a leading date in the Punjab.

'Ai!' said a woman excitedly. This seemed to make Kim's supernatural
origin more certain. 'Was not such an one's daughter born then--'

'And her mother bore her husband four sons in four years--all likely
boys,' cried the cultivator's wife, sitting outside the circle in the
shadow.

'None reared in the knowledge,' said the family priest, 'forget how the
planets stood in their Houses upon that night.' He began to draw in the
dust of the courtyard. 'At least thou hast good claim to a half of the
House of the Bull. How runs thy prophecy?'

'Upon a day,' said Kim, delighted at the sensation he was creating, 'I
shall be made great by means of a Red Bull on a green field, but first
there will enter two men making all things ready.'

'Yes: thus ever at the opening of a vision. A thick darkness that clears
slowly; anon one enters with a broom making ready the place. Then begins
the Sight. Two men--thou sayest? Ay, ay. The Sun, leaving the House of
the Bull, enters that of the Twins. Hence the two men of the prophecy.
Let us now consider. Fetch me a twig, little one.'

He knitted his brows, scratched, smoothed out, and scratched again in
the dust mysterious signs--to the wonder of all save the lama, who, with
fine instinct, forbore to interfere.

At the end of half an hour he tossed the twig from him with a grunt.

'Hm. Thus say the stars. Within three days come the two men to make all
things ready. After them follows the Bull; but the sign over against him
is the sign of War and armed men.'

'There was indeed a man of the Loodhiana Sikhs in the carriage from
Lahore,' said the cultivator's wife hopefully.

'Tck! Armed men--many hundreds. What concern hast thou with war?' said
the priest to Kim. 'Thine is a red and an angry sign of War to be loosed
very soon.'

'None--none,' said the lama earnestly. 'We seek only peace and our
River.'

Kim smiled, remembering what he had overheard in the dressing-room.
Decidedly he was a favourite of the stars.

The priest brushed his foot over the rude horoscope. 'More than this I
cannot see. In three days comes the Bull to thee, boy.'

'And my River, my River,' pleaded the lama. 'I had hoped his Bull would
lead us both to the River.'

'Alas, for that wondrous River, my brother,' the priest replied. 'Such
things are not common.'

Next morning, though they were pressed to stay, the lama insisted on
departure. They gave Kim a large bundle of good food and nearly three
annas in copper money for the needs of the road, and with many blessings
watched the two go southward in the dawn.

'Pity it is that these and such as these could not be freed from the
Wheel of Things,' said the lama.

'Nay, then would only evil people be left on the earth, and who would
give us meat and shelter?' quoth Kim, stepping merrily under his burden.

'Yonder is a small stream. Let us look,' said the lama, and he led from
the white road across the fields; walking into a very hornets'-nest of
pariah dogs.




CHAPTER III

          'Yea, voice of every Soul that clung
           To Life that strove from rung to rung
           When Devadatta's rule was young,
           The warm wind brings Kamakura.'


BEHIND them an angry farmer brandished a bamboo pole. He was a
market-gardener, Arain by caste, growing vegetables and flowers for
Umballa city, and well Kim knew the breed.

'Such an one,' said the lama, disregarding the dogs, 'is impolite to
strangers, intemperate of speech and uncharitable. Be warned by his
demeanour, my disciple.'

'Ho, shameless beggars!' shouted the farmer. 'Begone! Get hence!'

'We go,' the lama returned, with quiet dignity. 'We go from these
unblessed fields.'

'Ah,' said Kim, sucking in his breath. 'If the next crops fail, thou
canst only blame thy own tongue.'

The man shuffled uneasily in his slippers. 'The land is full of
beggars,' he began, half apologetically.

'And by what sign didst thou know that we would beg from thee, O Mali?'
said Kim tartly, using the name that a market-gardener least likes. 'All
we sought was to look at that river beyond the field there.'

'River, forsooth!' the man snorted. 'What city do ye hail from not to
know a canal-cut? It runs as straight as an arrow, and I pay for the
water as though it were molten silver. There is a branch of a river
beyond. But if ye need water I can give that--and milk.'

'Nay, we will go to the river,' said the lama, striding out.

'Milk and a meal,' the man stammered, as he looked at the strange tall
figure. 'I--I would not draw evil upon myself--or my crops; but beggars
are so many in these hard days.'

'Take notice,' the lama turned to Kim. 'He was led to speak harshly by
the Red Mist of anger. That clearing from his eyes, he becomes courteous
and of an affable heart. May his fields be blessed. Beware not to judge
men too hastily, O farmer.'

'I have met holy ones who would have cursed thee from hearthstone to
byre,' said Kim to the abashed man. 'Is he not wise and holy? I am his
disciple.'

He cocked his nose in the air loftily and stepped across the narrow
field-borders with great dignity.

'There is no pride,' said the lama, after a pause, 'there is no pride
among such as follow the Middle Way.'

'But thou hast said he was low caste and discourteous.'

'Low caste I did not say, for how can that be which is not? Afterwards
he amended his discourtesy, and I forgot the offence. Moreover, he is as
we are, bound upon the Wheel of Things; but he does not tread the way of
deliverance.' He halted at a little runlet among the fields, and
considered the hoof-pitted bank.

'Now, how wilt thou know thy River?' said Kim, squatting in the shade of
some tall sugar-cane.

'When I find it, an enlightenment will surely be given. This, I feel, is
not the place. O littlest among the waters, if only thou couldst tell
me where runs my River! But be thou blessed to make the fields bear!'

'Look! Look!' Kim sprang to his side and dragged him back. A yellow and
brown streak glided from the purple rustling stems to the bank,
stretched its neck to the water, drank, and lay still--a big cobra with
fixed, lidless eyes.

'I have no stick--I have no stick,' said Kim. 'I will get me one and
break his back.'

'Why? He is upon the Wheel as we are--a life ascending or
descending--very far from deliverance. Great evil must the soul have
done that is cast into this shape.'

'I hate all snakes,' said Kim. No native training can quench the white
man's horror of the Serpent.

'Let him live out his life.' The coiled thing hissed and half opened its
hood. 'May thy release come soon, brother,' the lama continued placidly.
'Hast thou knowledge, by chance, of my River?'

'Never have I seen such a man as thou art,' Kim whispered, overwhelmed.
'Do the very snakes understand thy talk?'

'Who knows?'. He passed within a foot of the cobra's poised head. It
flattened itself among the dusty coils.

'Come thou!' he called over his shoulder.

'Not I,' said Kim. 'I go round.'

'Come. He does no hurt.'

Kim hesitated for a moment. The lama backed his order by some droned
Chinese quotation which Kim took for a charm. He obeyed and bounded
across the rivulet, and the snake, indeed, made no sign.

'Never have I seen such a man.' Kim wiped the sweat from his forehead.
'And now, whither go we?'

'That is for thee to say. I am old, and a stranger--far from my own
place. But that the rel-carriage fills my head with noises of
devil-drums I would go in it to Benares now. . . . Yet by so going we
may miss the River. Let us find another river.'

Where the hard-worked soil gives three and even four crops a
year--through patches of sugar-cane, tobacco, long white radishes, and
nol-kol, all that day they strolled on, turning aside to every glimpse
of water; rousing village dogs and sleeping villages at noonday; the
lama replying to the vollied questions with an unswerving simplicity.
They sought a River--a River of miraculous healing. Had any one
knowledge of such a stream? Sometimes men laughed, but more often heard
the story out to the end and offered them a place in the shade, a drink
of milk, and a meal. The women were always kind, and the little children
as children are the world over, alternately shy and venturesome. Evening
found them at rest under the village tree of a mud-walled, mud-roofed
hamlet, talking to the headman as the cattle came in from the
grazing-grounds and the women prepared the day's last meal. They had
passed beyond the belt of market-gardens round hungry Umballa, and were
among the mile-wide green of the staple crops.

He was a white-bearded and affable elder, used to entertaining
strangers. He dragged out a string bedstead for the lama, set warm
cooked food before him, prepared him a pipe, and, the evening ceremonies
being finished in the village temple, sent for the village priest.

Kim told the older children tales of the size and beauty of Lahore, of
railway travel, and such-like city things, while the men talked, slowly
as their cattle chew the cud.

'I cannot fathom it,' said the headman at last to the priest. 'How
readest thou this talk?' The lama, his tale told, was silently telling
his beads.

'He is a Seeker,' the priest answered. 'The land is full of such.
Remember him who came only last month--the faquir with the tortoise?'

'Ay, but that man had right and reason, for Krishna Himself appeared in
a vision promising him Paradise without the burning-pyre if he journeyed
to Prayag. This man seeks no god who is within my knowledge.'

'Peace, he is old: he comes from far off, and he is mad,' the
smooth-shaven priest replied. 'Hear me.' He turned to the lama. 'Three
kos (six miles) to the westward runs the great road to Calcutta.'

'But I would go to Benares--to Benares.'

'And to Benares also. It crosses all streams on this side of Hind. Now
my word to thee, Holy One, is rest here till to-morrow. Then take the
road' (it was the Grand Trunk Road he meant) 'and test each stream that
it overpasses; for, as I understand, the virtue of thy River lies
neither in one pool nor place, but throughout its length. Then, if thy
gods will, be assured that thou wilt come upon thy freedom.'

'That is well said.' The lama was much impressed by the plan. 'We will
begin to-morrow, and a blessing on thee for showing old feet such a near
road.' A deep, sing-song Chinese half-chant closed the sentence. Even
the priest was impressed, and the headman feared an evil spell: but none
could look at the lama's simple, eager face and doubt him long.

'Seest thou my chela?' he said, diving into his snuff-gourd with an
important sniff. It was his duty to repay courtesy with courtesy.

'I see--and hear.' The headman rolled his eye where Kim was chatting to
a girl in blue as she laid crackling thorns on a fire.

'He also has a Search of his own. No river, but a Bull. Yea, a Red Bull
on a green field will some day raise him to honour. He is, I think, not
altogether of this world. He was sent of a sudden to aid me in this
search, and his name is Friend of all the World.'

The priest smiled. 'Ho there, Friend of all the World,' he cried across
the sharp-smelling smoke, 'what art thou?'

'This Holy One's disciple,' said Kim.

'He says thou art a but' (a spirit).

'Can buts eat?' said Kim, with a twinkle. 'For I am hungry.'

'It is no jest,' cried the lama. 'A certain astrologer of that city
whose name I have forgotten--'

'That is no more than the city of Umballa where we slept last night,'
Kim whispered to the priest.

'Ay, Umballa was it? He cast a horoscope and declared that my chela
should find his desire within two days. But what said he of the meaning
of the stars, Friend of all the World?'

Kim cleared his throat and looked around at the village graybeards.

'The meaning of my Star is War,' he replied pompously.

Somebody laughed at the little tattered figure strutting on the
brickwork plinth under the great tree. Where a native would have lain
down, Kim's white blood set him upon his feet.

'Ay, War,' he answered.

'That is a sure prophecy,' rumbled a deep voice. 'For there is always
war along the Border--as I know.'

It was an old, withered man, who had served the Government in the days
of the Mutiny as a native officer in a newly raised cavalry regiment.
The Government had given him a good holding in the village, and though
the demands of his sons, now gray-bearded officers on their own account,
had impoverished him, he was still a person of consequence. English
officials--Deputy Commissioners even--turned aside from the main road to
visit him, and on those occasions he dressed himself in the uniform of
ancient days, and stood up like a ramrod.

'But this shall be a great war--a war of eight thousand,' Kim's voice
shrilled across the quick-gathering crowd, astonishing himself.

'Redcoats or our own regiments?' the old man snapped, as though he were
asking an equal. His tone made men respect Kim.

'Redcoats,' said Kim at a venture. 'Redcoats and guns.'

'But--but the astrologer said no word of this,' cried the lama, snuffing
prodigiously in his excitement.

'But I know. The word has come to me, who am this Holy One's disciple.
There will rise a war--a war of eight thousand redcoats. From Pindi and
Peshawur they will be drawn. This is sure.'

'The boy has heard bazar-talk,' said the priest.

'But he was always by my side,' said the lama. 'How should he know? I
did not know.'

'He will make a clever juggler when the old man is dead,' muttered the
priest to the headman. 'What new trick is this?'

'A sign. Give me a sign,' thundered the old soldier suddenly. 'If there
were war my sons would have told me.'

'When all is ready, thy sons, doubt not, will be told. But it is a long
road from thy sons to the man in whose hands these things lie.' Kim
warmed to the game, for it reminded him of experiences in the
letter-carrying line, when, for the sake of a few pice, he pretended to
know more than he knew. But now he was playing for larger things--the
sheer excitement and the sense of power. He drew a new breath and went
on.

'Old man, give me a sign. Do underlings order the goings of eight
thousand redcoats--with guns?'

'No.' Still the old man answered as though Kim were an equal.

'Dost thou know who He is then that gives the order?'

'I have seen Him.'

'To know again?'

'I have known Him since he was a lieutenant in the topkhana' (the
Artillery).

'A tall man. A tall man with black hair, walking thus?' Kim took a few
paces in a stiff, wooden style.

'Ay. But that any one may have seen.' The crowd were breathless-still
through all this talk.

'That is true,' said Kim. 'But I will say more. Look now. First the
great man walks thus. Then He thinks thus. (Kim drew a forefinger over
his forehead and downwards till it came to rest by the angle of the
jaw.) Anon He twitches his fingers thus. Anon He thrusts his hat under
his left armpit.' Kim illustrated the motion and stood like a stork.

The old man groaned, inarticulate with amazement; and the crowd
shivered.

'So--so--so. But what does He when He is about to give an order?'

'He rubs the skin at the back of his neck--thus. Then falls one finger
on the table and he makes a small sniffing noise through his nose. Then
He speaks, saying: "Loose such and such a regiment. Call out such
guns."'

The old man rose stiffly and saluted.

'"For"'--Kim translated into the vernacular the clinching sentences he
had heard in the dressing-room at Umballa--'"For," says He, "we should
have done this long ago. It is not war--it is a chastisement. Snff!"'

'Enough. I believe. I have seen Him thus in the smoke of battles. Seen
and heard. It is He!'

'I saw no smoke'--Kim's voice shifted to the rapt sing-song of the
wayside fortune-teller. 'I saw this in darkness. First came a man to
make things clear. Then came horsemen. Then came He, standing in a ring
of light. The rest followed as I have said. Old man, have I spoken
truth?'

'It is He. Past all doubt it is He.'

The crowd drew a long, quavering breath, staring alternately at the old
man, still at attention, and ragged Kim against the purple twilight.

'Said I not--said I not he was from the other world?' cried the lama
proudly. 'He is the Friend of all the World. He is the Friend of the
Stars!'

'At least it does not concern us,' a man cried. 'O thou young
soothsayer, if the gift abides with thee at all seasons, I have a
red-spotted cow. She may be sister to thy Bull for aught I know--'

'Or I care,' said Kim. 'My Stars do not concern themselves with thy
cattle.'

'Nay, but she is very sick,' a woman struck in. 'My man is a buffalo, or
he would have chosen his words better. Tell me if she recover?'

Had Kim been at all an ordinary boy, he would have carried on the play;
but one does not know Lahore city, and least of all the faquirs by the
Taksali Gate, for thirteen years without also knowing human nature.

The priest looked at him sideways, something bitterly--a dry and
blighting smile.

'Is there no priest then in the village? I thought I had seen a great
one even now,' cried Kim.

'Ay--but--' the woman began.

'But thou and thy husband hoped to get the cow cured for a handful of
thanks.' The shot told: they were notoriously the closest-fisted couple
in the village. 'It is not well to cheat the temples. Give a young calf
to thy own priest, and, unless thy gods are angry past recall, she will
give milk within a month.'

'A master-beggar art thou,' purred the priest approvingly. 'Not the
cunning of forty years could have done better. Surely thou hast made the
old man rich?'

'A little flour, a little butter and a mouthful of cardamoms,' Kim
retorted, flushed with the praise, but still cautious--'does one grow
rich on that? And, as thou canst see, he is mad. But it serves me while
I learn the road at least.'

He knew what the faquirs of the Taksali Gate were like when they talked
among themselves, and copied the very inflection of their lewd
disciples.

'Is his Search, then, truth or a cloak to other ends? It may be
treasure.'

'He is mad--many times mad. There is nothing else.'

Here the old soldier hobbled up and asked if Kim would accept his
hospitality for the night. The priest recommended him to do so, but
insisted that the honour of entertaining the lama belonged to the
temple--at which the lama smiled guilelessly. Kim glanced from one face
to the other, and drew his own conclusions.

'Where is the money?' he whispered, beckoning the old man off into the
darkness.

'In my bosom. Where else?'

'Give it me. Quietly and swiftly give it me.'

'But why? Here is no ticket to buy.'

'Am I thy chela, or am I not? Do I not safeguard thy old feet about the
ways? Give me the money and at dawn I will return it.' He slipped his
hand above the lama's girdle and brought away the purse.

'Be it so--be it so.' The old man nodded his head. 'This is a great and
terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.'

Next morning the priest was in a very bad temper, but the lama was quite
happy; and Kim had enjoyed a most interesting evening with the old man,
who brought out his cavalry sabre and, balancing it on his dry knees,
told tales of the Mutiny and young captains thirty years in their
graves, till Kim dropped off to sleep.

'Certainly the air of this country is good,' said the lama. 'I sleep
lightly, as do all old men; but last night I slept unwaking till broad
day. Even now I am heavy.'

'Drink a draught of hot milk,' said Kim, who had carried not a few such
remedies to opium-smokers of his acquaintance. 'It is time to take the
road again.'

'The long road that overpasses all the rivers of Hind,' said the lama
gaily. 'Let us go. But how thinkest thou, chela, to recompense these
people, and especially the priest, for their great kindness? Truly they
are but-parast, but in other lives, may be, they will receive
enlightenment. A rupee to the temple? The thing within is no more than
stone and red paint, but the heart of man we must acknowledge when and
where it is good.'

'Holy One, hast thou ever taken the road alone?' Kim looked up sharply,
like the Indian crows so busy about the fields.

'Surely, child: from Kulu to Pathankot--from Kulu, where my first chela
died. When men were kind to us we made offerings, and all men were
well-disposed throughout all the Hills.'

'It is otherwise in Hind,' said Kim drily. 'Their gods are many-armed
and malignant. Let them alone.'

'I would set thee on thy road for a little, Friend of all the
World--thou and thy yellow man.' The old soldier ambled up the village
street, all shadowy in the dawn, on a gaunt, scissor-hocked pony. 'Last
night broke up the fountains of remembrance in my so-dried heart, and it
was as a blessing to me. Truly there is war abroad in the air. I smell
it. See! I have brought my sword.'

He sat long-legged on the little beast, with the big sword at his
side,--hand dropped on the pommel,--staring fiercely over the flat lands
towards the north. 'Tell me again how He showed in thy vision. Come up
and sit behind me. The beast will carry two.'

'I am this Holy One's disciple,' said Kim, as they cleared the
village-gate. The villagers seemed almost sorry to be rid of them, but
the priest's farewell was cold and distant. He had wasted some opium on
a man who carried no money.

'That is well spoken. I am not much used to holy men, but respect is
always good. There is no respect in these days--not even when a
Commissioner Sahib comes to see me. But why should one whose Star leads
him to war follow a holy man?'

'But he is a holy man,' said Kim earnestly. 'In truth, and in talk and
in act, holy. He is not like the others. I have never seen such an one.
We be not fortune-tellers, or jugglers, or beggars.'

'Thou art not, that I can see; but I do not know that other. He marches
well, though.'

The first freshness of the day carried the lama forward with long, easy,
camel-like strides. He was deep in meditation, mechanically clicking his
rosary.

They followed the rutted and worn country road that wound across the
flat between the great dark-green mango-groves, the line of the
snow-capped Himalayas faint to the eastward. All India was at work in
the fields, to the creaking of well-wheels, the shouting of ploughmen
behind their cattle, and the clamour of the crows. Even the pony felt
the good influence and almost broke into a trot as Kim laid a hand on
the stirrup-leather.

'It repents me that I did not give a rupee to the shrine,' said the lama
on the last bead of his eighty-one.

The old soldier growled in his beard, so that the lama for the first
time was aware of him.

'Seekest thou the River also?' said he, turning.

'The day is new,' was the reply. 'What need of a river save to water at
before sundown? I come to show thee a short lane to the Big Road.'

'That is a courtesy to be remembered, O man of good will; but why the
sword?'

The old soldier looked as abashed as a child interrupted in his game of
make-believe.

'The sword,' he said, fumbling it. 'Oh, that was a fancy of mine--an
old man's fancy. Truly the police orders are that no man must bear
weapons throughout Hind, but'--he cheered up and slapped the hilt--'all
the constabeels hereabout know me.'

'It is not a good fancy,' said the lama. 'What profit to kill men?'

'Very little--as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it
would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers. I do not speak
without knowledge who have seen the land from Delhi south awash with
blood.'

'What madness was that, then?'

'The Gods, who sent it for a plague, alone know. A madness ate into all
the Army, and they turned against their officers. That was the first
evil, but not past remedy if they had then held their hands. But they
chose to kill the Sahibs' wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from
over the sea and called them to most strict account.'

'Some such rumour, I believe, reached me once long ago. They called it
the Black Year, as I remember.'

'What manner of life hast thou led, not to know The Year? A rumour
indeed! All earth knew, and trembled.'

'Our earth never shook but once--upon the day that the Excellent One
received Enlightenment.'

'Umph! I saw Delhi shake at least; and Delhi is the navel of the world.'

'So they turned against women and children? That was a bad deed, for
which the punishment cannot be avoided.'

'Many strove to do so, but with very small profit. I was then in a
regiment of cavalry. It broke. Of six hundred and eighty sabres stood
fast to their salt--how many think you? Three. Of whom I was one.'

[Illustration: He sat long-legged on the little beast, with the big
sword at his side--hand dropped on the pommel--staring fiercely ever the
flat Lands. . .]

'The greater merit.'

'Merit! We did not consider it merit in those days. My people, my
friends, my brothers fell from me. They said: "The time of the English
is accomplished. Let each strike out a little holding for himself." But
I had talked with the men of Sobraon, of Chillianwallah, of Moodkee and
Ferozeshah. I said: "Abide a little and the wind turns. There is no
blessing in this work." In those days I rode seventy miles with an
English memsahib and her babe on my saddle-bow. (Wow! That was a horse
fit for a man!) I placed them in safety, and back came I to my
officer--the one that was not killed of our five. "Give me work," said
I, "for I am an outcast among my own kin, and my cousin's blood is wet
on my sabre." "Be content," said he. "There is great work forward. When
this madness is over there is a recompense."'

'Ay, there is a recompense when the madness is over, surely?' the lama
muttered half to himself.

'They did not hang medals in those days on all who by accident had heard
a gun fired. No! In nineteen pitched battles was I; in six-and-forty
skirmishes of horse; and in small affairs without number. Nine wounds I
bear; a medal and four clasps and the medal of an Order, for my captains
who are now generals, remembered me when the Kaiser-i-Hind had
accomplished fifty years of her reign, and all the land rejoiced. They
said: "Give him the order of Berittish India." I carry it upon my neck
now. I have also my jaghir (holding) from the hands of the State--a free
gift to me and mine. The men of the old days--they are now
Commissioners--come riding to me through the crops,--high upon horses so
that all the village sees,--and we talk out the old skirmishes, one
dead man's name leading to another.'

'And after?' said the lama.

'Oh, afterwards they go away, but not before my village has seen.'

'And at the last what wilt thou do?'

'At the last I shall die.'

'And after?'

'Let the Gods order it. I have never pestered Them with prayers: I do
not think they will pester me. Look you, I have noticed in my long life
that those who eternally break in upon Those Above with complaints and
reports and bellowings and weepings are presently sent for in haste, as
our colonel used to send for slack-jawed down-country men who talked too
much. No, I have never wearied the Gods. They will remember this, and
give me a quiet place where I can drive my lance in the shade, and wait
to welcome my sons: I have no less than three--ressaldar-majors all--in
the regiments.'

'And they likewise, bound upon the Wheel, go forth from life to
life--from despair to despair,' said the lama below his breath, 'hot,
uneasy, snatching.'

'Ay,' the old soldier chuckled. 'Three ressaldar-majors in three
regiments. Gamblers a little, but so am I. They must be well mounted;
and one cannot take the horses as in the old days one took women. Well,
well, my holding can pay for all. How thinkest thou? It is a
well-watered strip, but my men cheat me. I do not know how to ask save
at the lance's point. Ugh! I grow angry and I curse them, and they feign
penitence, but behind my back I know they call me a toothless old ape.'

'Hast thou never desired any other thing?'

Yes--yes--a thousand times! A straight back and a close-clinging knee
once more; a quick wrist and a keen eye; and the marrow that makes a
man. Oh, the old days--the good days of my strength!'

'That strength is weakness.'

'It has turned so; but fifty years since I could have proved it
otherwise,' the old soldier retorted, driving his stirrup-edge into the
pony's lean flank.

'But I know a River of great healing.'

'I have drunk Gunga-water to the edge of dropsy. All she gave me was a
flux, and no sort of strength.'

'It is not Gunga. The River that I know washes from all taint of sin.
Ascending the far bank one is assured of Freedom. I do not know thy
life, but thy face is the face of the honourable and courteous. Thou
hast clung to thy Way, rendering fidelity when it was hard to give, in
that Black Year of which I now remember other tales. Enter now upon the
Middle Way, which is the path to Freedom. Hear the Most Excellent Law,
and do not follow dreams.'

'Speak then, old man,' the soldier smiled, half saluting. 'We be all
babblers at our age.'

The lama squatted under the shade of a mango, whose shadow played
checkerwise over his face; the soldier sat stiffly on the pony; and Kim,
making sure that there were no snakes, lay down in the crotch of the
twisted roots.

There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of
doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and
impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier
slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins
round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered--the periods lengthened. Kim
was busy watching a gray squirrel. When the little scolding bunch of
fur, close pressed to the branch, disappeared, preacher and audience
were fast asleep, the old officer's strong-cut head pillowed on his arm,
the lama's thrown back against the tree hole, where it showed like
yellow ivory. A naked child toddled up, stared, and, moved by some quick
impulse of reverence made a solemn little obeisance before the
lama--only the child was so short and fat that it toppled over sideways,
and Kim laughed at the sprawling, chubby legs. The child, scared and
indignant, yelled aloud.

'Hai! Hai!' said the soldier leaping to his feet. 'What is it? What
orders? . . . It is . . . a child! I dreamed it was an alarm. Little
one--little one--do not cry. Have I slept? That was discourteous
indeed!'

'I fear! I am afraid!' roared the child.

'What is it to fear? Two old men and a boy? How wilt thou ever make a
soldier, Princeling?'

The lama had waked too, but, taking no direct notice of the child,
clicked his rosary.

'What is that?' said the child, stopping a yell midway. 'I have never
seen such things. Give them me.'

'Aha,' said the lama, smiling, and trailing a loop of it on the grass:

          'This is a handful of cardamoms,
            This is a lump of ghi:
          This is millet and chillies and rice,
            A supper for thee and me!'

The child shrieked with joy, and snatched at the dark, glancing beads.

'Oho!' said the old soldier. 'Whence had thou that song, despiser of
this world?'

'I learned it in Pathankot--sitting on a door-step,' said the lama
shyly. 'It is good to be kind to babes.'

'As I remember, before the sleep came on us, thou hadst told me that
marriage and bearing were darkeners of the true light, stumbling-blocks
upon the way. Do children drop from heaven in thy country? Is it the Way
to sing them songs?'

'No man is all perfect,' said the lama gravely, recoiling the rosary.
'Run now to thy mother, little one.'

'Hear him!' said the soldier to Kim. 'He is ashamed for that he has made
a child happy. There was a very good householder lost in thee, my
brother. Hai, child!' He threw it a pice. 'Sweetmeats are always sweet.'
And as the little figure capered away into the sunshine: 'They grow up
and become men. Holy One, I grieve that I slept in the midst of thy
preaching. Forgive me.'

'We be two old men,' said the lama. 'The fault is mine. I listened to
thy talk of the world and its madness, and one fault led to the next.'

'Hear him! What harm do thy Gods suffer from play with a babe? And that
song was very well sung. Let us go on and I will sing thee the song of
Nikal Seyn before Delhi--the old song.'

And they fared out from the gloom of the mango tope, the old man's high,
shrill voice ringing across the field, as wail by long-drawn wail he
unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn (Nicholson)--the song that men sing in
the Punjab to this day. Kim was delighted, and the lama listened with
deep interest.

'Ahi! Nikal Seyn is dead--he died before Delhi! Lances of North take
vengeance for Nikal Seyn.' He quavered it out to the end, marking the
trills with the flat of his sword on the pony's rump.

'And now we come to the Big Road,' said he, after receiving the
compliments of Kim; for the lama was markedly silent. 'It is long since
I have ridden this way, but thy boy's talk stirred me. See, Holy
One--the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind. For the most part
it is shaded, as here, with four lines of trees; the middle road--all
hard--takes the quick traffic. In the days before rail-carriages the
Sahibs travelled up and down here in hundreds. Now there are only
country-carts and such like. Left and right is the rougher road for the
heavy carts--grain and cotton and timber, bhoosa, lime and hides. A man
goes in safety here--for at every few kos is a police-station. The
police are thieves and extortioners (I myself would patrol it with
cavalry--young recruits under a strong captain), but at least they do
not suffer any rivals. All castes and kinds of men move here. Look!
Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims
and potters--all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from
which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.'

And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs
straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred
miles--such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They
looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white
breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk; and the two-roomed
police-station opposite.

'Who bears arms against the law?' a constable called out laughingly, as
he caught sight of the soldier's sword, 'Are not the police enough to
destroy evil-doers?'

'It was because of the police I bought it,' was the answer. 'Does all go
well in Hind?'

'Ressaldar Sahib, all goes well.'

'I am like an old tortoise, look you, who puts his head out from the
bank and draws it in again. Ay, this is the road of Hindustan. All men
come by this way. . . .'

'Son of a swine, is the soft part of the road meant for thee to scratch
thy back upon? Father of all the daughters of shame and husband of ten
thousand virtueless ones, thy mother was devoted to a devil, being led
thereto by her mother; thy aunts have never had a nose for seven
generations! Thy sister--What owl's folly told thee to draw thy carts
across the road? A broken wheel? Then take a broken head and put the two
together at leisure!'

The voice and a venomous whip-cracking came out of a pillar of dust
fifty yards away, where a cart had broken down. A thin, high Kattiwar
mare, with eyes and nostrils aflame, rocketed out of the jam, snorting
and wincing as her rider bent her across the road in chase of a shouting
man. He was tall and gray-bearded, sitting the almost mad beast as a
piece of her, and scientifically lashing his victim between plunges.

The old man's face lit with pride. 'My child!' said he briefly, and
strove to rein the pony's neck to a fitting arch.

'Am I to be beaten before the police?' cried the carter. 'Justice! I
will have Justice--'

'Am I to be blocked by a shouting ape who upsets ten thousand sacks
under a young horse's nose? That is the way to ruin a mare.'

'He speaks truth. He speaks truth. But she follows her man close,' said
the old man. The carter ran under the wheels of his cart and thence
threatened all sorts of vengeance.

'They are strong men, thy sons,' said the policeman serenely, picking
his teeth.

The horseman delivered one last vicious cut with his whip and came on at
a canter.

'My father!' He reined back ten yards and dismounted.

The old man was off his pony in an instant, and they embraced as do
father and son in the East.




CHAPTER IV

          Good Luck, she is never a lady,
          But the cursedest quean alive.
          Tricksy, wincing, and jady--
          Kittle to lead or drive.
          Greet her--she's hailing a stranger!
          Meet her--she's busking to leave!
          Let her alone for a shrew to the bone
          And the hussy comes plucking your sleeve!
            Largesse! Largesse, O Fortune!
            Give or hold at your will
            If I've no care for Fortune,
            Fortune must follow me still!
                                'The Wishing Caps.'


THEN, lowering their voices, they spoke together. Kim came to rest under
a tree, but the lama tugged impatiently at his elbow.

'Let us go on. The River is not here.'

'Hai mai? Have we not walked enough for a little? Our River will not run
away. Patience, and he will give us a dole.'

'That,' said the old soldier suddenly, 'is the Friend of the Stars. He
brought me the news yesterday. Having seen the very man Himself, in a
vision, giving orders for the war.'

'Hm!' said his son, all deep in his broad chest. 'He came by a
bazar-rumour and made profit of it.'

His father laughed. 'At least he did not ride to me begging for a new
charger and the gods know how many rupees. Are thy brothers' regiments
also under orders?'

'I do not know. I took leave and came swiftly to thee in case--'

'In case they ran before thee to beg. O gamblers and spendthrifts all!
But thou hast never yet ridden in a charge. A good horse is needed
there, truly. A good follower and a good pony also for the marching. Let
us see--let us see.' He thrummed on the pommel.

'This is no place to cast accounts in, my father. Let us go to thy
house.'

'At least pay the boy then: I have no pice with me, and he brought
auspicious news. Ho! Friend of all the World, a war is toward as thou
hast said.'

'Nay, as I know, the war,' returned Kim composedly.

'Eh?' said the lama, fingering his beads, all eager for the road.

'My master does not trouble the Stars for hire. We brought the
news--bear witness we brought the news, and now we go.' Kim half-crooked
his hand at his side.

The son tossed a silver coin through the sunlight, grumbling something
about beggars and jugglers. It was a four-anna piece, and would feed
them well for some days. The lama, seeing the flash of the metal, droned
a blessing.

'Go thy way, Friend of all the World,' piped the old soldier, wheeling
his scrawny mount. 'For once in all my days I have met a true
prophet--who was not in the Army.'

Father and son swung round together: the old man sitting as erect as the
younger.

A Punjabi constable in yellow linen trousers slouched across the road.
He had seen the money pass.

'Halt!' he cried in impressive English. 'Know ye not that there is a
takkus of two annas a head, which is four annas, on those who enter the
road from this side-road. It is the order of the Sirkar, and the money
is spent for the planting of trees and the beautification of the ways.'

'And the bellies of the police,' said Kim, skipping out of arm's reach.
'Consider for a while, man with a mud head. Think you we came from the
nearest pond like the frog, thy father-in-law. Hast thou ever heard the
name of thy brother?'

'And who was he? Leave the boy alone,' cried a senior constable,
immensely delighted, as he squatted down to smoke his pipe in the
veranda.

'He took a label from a bottle of belaitee-pani (soda-water), and,
affixing it to a bridge, collected taxes for a month from those who
passed, saying that it was the Sirkar's order. Then came an Englishman
and broke his head. Ah, brother, I am a town-crow, not a village-crow!'

The policeman drew back abashed, and Kim hooted at him all down the
road.

'Was there ever such a disciple as I?' he cried merrily to the lama.
'All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of Lahore city if
I had not guarded thee.'

'I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or
sometimes an evil imp,' said the lama, smiling slowly.

'I am thy chela.' Kim dropped into step at his side--that indescribable
gait of the long-distance tramp all the world over.

'Now let us walk,' muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary
they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama, as usual, was deep in
meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling
river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and
crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every
stride--castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his
experience.

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of
lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing
at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at
a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room;
for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly
across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him,
strode one newly released from the jail; his full stomach and shiny skin
to prove that the Government fed its prisoners better than most honest
men could feed themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest
of it as they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh
devotee in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel
quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked past,
returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States, where he
had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to College-trained
princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches. Kim was careful not to
irritate that man; for the Akali's temper is short and his arm quick.
Here and there they met or were overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of
whole villages turning out to some local fair; the women, with their
babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on
sticks of sugar-cane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as
they sell for a halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their
betters from cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had
bought; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives
comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass
bracelets that come from the North-West. These merry-makers stepped
slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with
sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the wayside
shrines--sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman--which the low caste of
both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid line of blue,
rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing
up through the quivering dust and trot past to a chorus of quick
cackling. That was a gang of changars--the women who have taken all the
embankments of all the Northern railways under their charge--a
flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of
earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by
the road. They belong to the caste whose men do not count, and they
walked with squared elbows, swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits
women who carry heavy weights. A little later a marriage procession
would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell
of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One
could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering
through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to
snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the
Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred
sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more interesting and
more to be shouted over it was when a strolling juggler with some
half-trained monkeys, or a panting, feeble bear, or a woman who tied
goats' horns to her feet, and with these danced on a slack-rope, set the
horses to shying and the women to shrill, long-drawn quavers of
amazement.

The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the money-lender on his
goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel interest; or the
long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob--still in military formation--of
native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be rid of their breeches and
puttees, and saying the most outrageous things to the most respectable
women in sight. Even the seller of Ganges-water he did not see, and Kim
expected that he would at least buy a bottle of that precious stuff. He
looked steadily at the ground, and strode as steadily hour after hour,
his soul busied elsewhere. But Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy. The
Grand Trunk at this point was built on an embankment to guard against
winter floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a
little above the country, along a stately corridor, seeing all India
spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked
grain and cotton waggons crawling over the country-roads: one could hear
their axles, complaining a mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts
and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on
to the hard main road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful
to watch the people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white
and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and
growing small by twos and threes across the level plain. Kim felt these
things, though he could not give tongue to his feelings, and so
contented himself with buying peeled sugar-cane and spitting the pith
generously about his path. From time to time the lama took snuff, and at
last Kim could endure the silence no longer.

'This is a good land--the land of the South!' said he. 'The air is good;
the water is good. Eh?'

'And they are all bound upon the Wheel,' said the lama. 'Bound from life
after life. To none of these has the Way been shown.' He shook himself
back to this world.

'And now we have walked a weary way,' said Kim. 'Surely we shall soon
come to a parao (a resting-place). Shall we stay there? Look, the sun is
sloping.'

'Who will receive us this evening?'

'That is all one. This country is full of good folk. Besides,'--he sunk
his voice beneath a whisper,--'we have money.'

The crowd thickened as they neared the resting-place which marked the
end of their day's journey. A line of stalls selling very simple food
and tobacco, a stack of firewood, a police-station, a well, a
horse-trough, a few trees, and, under them, some trampled ground dotted
with the black ashes of old fires, are all that mark a parao on the
Grand Trunk; if you except the beggars and the crows--both hungry.

By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower
branches of the mango trees; the parakeets and doves were coming home in
their hundreds; the chattering, gray-backed Seven Sisters, talking over
the day's adventures, walked back and forth in twos and threes almost
under the feet of the travellers; and shufflings and scufflings in the
branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night-picket.
Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the
faces and the cart-wheels and the bullocks' horns as red as blood. Then
the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze,
like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and
bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and
the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes. The evening patrol
hurried out of the police-station with important coughings and
reiterated orders; and a live charcoal ball in the cup of a wayside
carter's hookah glowed red while Kim's eye mechanically watched the last
flicker of the sun on the brass tweezers.

[Illustration: The Lama and Kim walked a little to one side; Kim chewing
his stick of sugar-cane, and making way for no one under the status of a
priest.]

The life of the parao was very like that of the Kashmir Serai on a small
scale. Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if you only
allow time, will bring you everything that a simple man needs.

His wants were few, because, since the lama had no caste scruples,
cooked food from the nearest stall would serve; but, for luxury's sake,
Kim bought a handful of dung-cakes to build a fire. All about, coming
and going round the little flames, men cried for oil, or grain, or
sweetmeats, or tobacco, jostling one another while they waited their
turn at the well; and under the men's voices you heard from halted,
shuttered carts the high squeals and giggles of women whose faces should
not be seen in public.

Nowadays, well-educated natives are of opinion that when their womenfolk
travel--and they visit a good deal--it is better to take them quickly by
rail in a properly screened compartment; and that custom is spreading.
But there are always those of the old rock who hold by the use of their
forefathers; and, above all, there are always the old women,--more
conservative than the men,--who toward the end of their days go a
pilgrimage. They, being withered and undesirable, do not, under certain
circumstances, object to unveiling. After their long seclusion, during
which they have always been in business touch with a thousand outside
interests, they love the bustle and stir of the open road, the
gatherings at the shrines, and the infinite possibilities of gossip with
like-minded dowagers. Very often it suits a long-suffering family that a
strong-tongued, iron-willed old lady should disport herself about India
in this fashion; for certainly pilgrimage is grateful to the Gods. So
all about India, in the most remote places, as in the most public, you
find some knot of grizzled servitors in nominal charge of an old lady
who is more or less curtained and hid away in a bullock-cart. Such men
are staid and discreet, and when a European or a high-caste native is
near will net their charge with most elaborate precautions; but in the
ordinary haphazard chances of pilgrimage the precautions are not taken.
The old lady is, after all, intensely human, and lives to look upon
life.

Kim marked down a gaily ornamented ruth or family bullock-cart, with a
broidered canopy of two domes, like a double-humped camel, which had
just been drawn into the parao. Eight men made its retinue, and two of
the eight were armed with rusty sabres--sure signs that they followed a
person of distinction, for the common folk do not bear arms. An
increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a
European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains.
Here was evidently a woman used to command.

Kim looked over the retinue critically. Half of them were thin-legged,
gray-bearded Ooryas from down country. The other half were duffle-clad,
felt-hatted hillmen of the North: and that mixture told its own tale,
even if he had not overheard the incessant sparring between the two
divisions. The old lady was going south on a visit--probably to a rich
relative, most probably to a son-in-law, who had sent up an escort as a
mark of respect. The hillmen would be of her own people--Kulu or Kangra
folk. It was quite clear that she was not taking her daughter down to be
wedded, or the curtains would have been laced home and the guard would
have allowed no one near the car. A merry and a high-spirited dame,
thought Kim, balancing the dung-cake in one hand, the cooked food in the
other, and piloting the lama with a nudging shoulder. Something might be
made out of the meeting. The lama would give him no help, but, as a
conscientious chela, Kim was delighted to beg for two.

He built his fire as close to the cart as he dared, waiting for one of
the escort to order him away. The lama dropped wearily to the ground,
much as a heavy fruit-eating bat cowers, and returned to his rosary.

'Stand farther off, beggar!' The order was shouted in broken Hindustanee
by one of the hillmen.

'Huh! It is only a pahari' (a hillman), said Kim over his shoulder.
'Since when have the hill-asses owned all Hindustan?'

The retort was a swift and brilliant sketch of Kim's pedigree for three
generations.

'Ah!' Kim's voice was sweeter than ever, as he broke the dung-cake into
fit pieces. 'In my country we call that the beginning of love-talk.'

A harsh, thin cackle behind the curtains put the hillman on his mettle
for a second shot.

'Not so bad--not so bad,' said Kim with calm. 'But have a care, my
brother, lest we--we, I say--be minded to give a curse or so in return.
And our curses have the knack of biting home.'

The Ooryas laughed; the hillman sprang forward threateningly; the lama
suddenly raised his head, bringing his huge tam-o'-shanter cap into the
full light of Kim's new-started fire.

'What is it?' said he.

The man halted as though struck to stone. 'I--I--am saved from a great
sin,' he stammered.

'The foreigner has found him a priest at last,' whispered one of the
Ooryas.

'Hai! Why is that beggar-brat not well beaten?' the old woman cried.

The hillman drew back to the cart and whispered something to the
curtain. There was dead silence, then a muttering.

'This goes well,' thought Kim, pretending neither to see nor hear.

'When--when--he has eaten,'--the hillman fawned on Kim--'it--it is
requested that the Holy One will do the honour to talk to one who would
speak to him.'

'After he has eaten he will sleep,' Kim returned loftily. He could not
quite see what new turn the game had taken, but stood resolute to profit
by it. 'Now, I will get him his food.' The last sentence, spoken loudly,
ended with a sigh as of faintness.

'I--I myself and the others of my people will look to that--if it is
permitted.'

'It is permitted,' said Kim, more loftily than ever. 'Holy One, these
people will bring us food.'

'The land is good. All the country of the South is good--a great and a
terrible world,', mumbled the lama drowsily.

'Let him sleep,' said Kim, 'but look to it that we are well fed when he
wakes. He is a very holy man.'

Again one of the Ooryas said something contemptuously.

'He is not a faquir. He is not a down-country beggar,' Kim went on
severely, addressing the stars. 'He is the most holy of holy men. He is
above all castes. I am his chela.'

'Come here!' said the flat thin voice behind the curtain; and Kim came,
conscious that eyes he could not see were staring at him. One skinny
brown finger heavy with rings lay on the edge of the cart, and the talk
went this way:

'Who is that one?'

'An exceedingly holy one. He comes from far off. He comes from Tibet.'

'Where in Tibet?'

'From behind the snows--from a very far place. He knows the stars; he
makes horoscopes; he reads nativities. But he does not do this for
money. He does it for kindness and great charity. I am his disciple. I
am called also the Friend of the Stars.'

'Thou art no hillman.'

'Ask him. He will tell thee I was sent to him from the stars to show him
an end to his pilgrimage.'

'Humph! Consider, brat, that I am an old woman and not altogether a
fool. Lamas I know, and to these I give reverence, but thou art no more
a lawful chela than this my finger is the pole of this waggon. Thou art
a casteless Hindu--a bold and unblushing beggar, attached, belike, to
the Holy One for the sake of gain.'

'Do we not all work for gain?' Kim changed his tone promptly to match
that altered voice. 'I have heard'--this was a bow drawn at a
venture--'I have heard--'

'What hast thou heard?' she snapped, rapping with the finger.

'Nothing that I well remember, but some talk in the bazars, which is
doubtless a lie, that even Rajahs--small hill Rajahs--'

'But none the less of good Rajput blood.'

'Assuredly of good blood. That these even sell the more comely of their
womenfolk for gain. Down south they sell them--to zemindars and such-all
of Oudh.'

If there be one thing in the world that the small hill Rajahs deny it is
just this charge; but it happens to be one thing that the bazars
believe, when they discuss the mysterious slave-traffics of India. The
old lady explained to Kim, in a tense, indignant whisper, precisely what
manner and fashion of malignant liar he was. Had Kim hinted this when
she was a girl, he would have been pommelled to death that same evening
by an elephant. This was perfectly true.

'Ahai! I am only a beggar's brat, as the Eye of Beauty has said,' he
wailed in extravagant terror.

'Eye of Beauty, forsooth! Who am I that thou shouldst fling
beggar-endearments at me?' And yet she laughed at the long-forgotten
word. 'Forty years ago that might have been said, and not without truth.
Ay, thirty years ago. But it is the fault of this gadding up and down
Hind that a king's widow must jostle all the scum of the land, and be
made a mock by beggars.'

'Great Queen,' said Kim promptly, for he heard her shaking with
indignation, 'I am even what the Great Queen says I am; but none the
less is my master holy. He has not yet heard the Great Queen's order
that--'

'Order? I order a Holy One--a Teacher of the Law--to come and speak to a
woman? Never!'

'Pity my stupidity. I thought it was given as an order--'

'It was not. It was a petition. Does this make all clear?'

A silver coin clicked on the edge of the cart. Kim took it and salaamed
profoundly. The old lady recognised that, as the eyes and the ears of
the lama, he was to be propitiated.

'I am but the Holy One's disciple. When he has eaten perhaps he will
come.'

'Oh, villain and shameless rogue!' The jewelled forefinger shook itself
at him reprovingly; but he could hear the old lady's chuckle.

'Nay, what is it?' he said, dropping into his most caressing and
confidential tone--the one, he well knew, that few could resist. 'Is--is
there any need of a son in thy family? Speak freely, for we priests--'
That last was a direct plagiarism from a faquir by the Taksali Gate.

'We priests! Thou art not yet old enough to--' She checked the joke with
another laugh. 'Believe me, now and again, we women, O priest, think of
other matters than sons. Moreover, my daughter has borne her man-child.'

'Two arrows in the quiver are better than one; and three are better
still.' Kim quoted the proverb with a meditative cough, looking
discreetly earthward.

'True--oh, true. But perhaps that will come. Certainly those
down-country Brahmins are utterly useless. I sent gifts and monies and
gifts again to them and they prophesied.'

'Ah,' drawled Kim, with infinite contempt, 'they prophesied!' A
professional could have done no better.

'And it was not till I remembered my own Gods that my prayers were
heard. I chose an auspicious hour, and--perhaps thy Holy One has heard
of the Abbot of the Lung-Cho lamassery. It was to him I put the matter,
and behold in the due time all came about as I desired. The Brahmin in
the house of the father of my daughter's son has since said that it was
through his prayers--which is a little error that I will explain to him
when we reach our journey's end. And so afterwards I go to Buddh Gaya,
to make shraddha for the father of my children.'

'Thither go we.'

'Doubly auspicious,' chirruped the old lady. 'A second son at least!'

'O Friend of all the World!' The lama had waked, and, simply as a child
bewildered in a strange bed, called for Kim.

'I come! I come, Holy One!' He dashed to the fire, where he found the
lama already surrounded by dishes of food, the hillmen visibly adoring
him and the Southerners looking sourly.

'Go back! Withdraw!' Kim cried. 'Do we eat publicly like dogs?' They
finished the meal in silence, each turned a little from the other, and
Kim topped it with a native-made cigarette.

'Have I not said an hundred times that the South is a good land? Here is
a virtuous and high-born widow of a Hill Rajah on pilgrimage, she says,
to Buddh Gaya. She it is sends us those dishes; and when thou art well
rested she would speak to thee.'

'Is this also thy work?' The lama dipped deep into his snuff-gourd.

'Who else watched over thee since our wonderful journey began?' Kim's
eyes danced in his head as he blew the rank smoke through his nostrils
and stretched him on the dusty ground. 'Have I failed to oversee thy
comforts, Holy One?'

'A blessing on thee.' The lama inclined his solemn head. 'I have known
many men in my so long life, and disciples not a few. But to none among
men, if so be thou art woman-born, has my heart gone out as it has to
thee--thoughtful, wise, and courteous, but something of a small imp.'

'And I have never seen such a priest as thou.' Kim considered the
benevolent yellow face wrinkle by wrinkle. 'It is less than three days
since we took road together, and it is as though it were a hundred
years.'

'Perhaps in a former life it was permitted that I should have rendered
thee some service. May be'--he smiled--'I freed thee from a trap; or,
having caught thee on a hook in the days when I was not enlightened,
cast thee back into the river.'

'May be,' said Kim quietly. He had heard this sort of speculation again
and again, from the mouths of many whom the English would not consider
imaginative. 'Now, as regards that woman in the bullock-cart, I think
she needs a second son for her daughter.'

'That is no part of the Way,' sighed the lama. 'But at least she is from
the Hills. Ah, the Hills, and the snow of the Hills!'

He rose and stalked to the cart. Kim would have given his ears to come
too, but the lama did not invite him; and the few words he caught were
in an unknown tongue, for they spoke some common speech of the
mountains. The woman seemed to ask questions which the lama turned over
in his mind before answering. Now and again he heard the sing-song
cadence of a Chinese quotation. It was a strange picture that Kim
watched between drooped eyelids. The lama, very straight and erect, the
deep folds of his yellow clothing slashed with black in the light of the
parao fires precisely as a knotted tree-trunk is slashed with the shadow
of the long sun, addressed a tinsel and lacquered ruth which burned like
a many-coloured jewel in the same uncertain light. The patterns on the
gold-worked curtains ran up and down, melting and re-forming as the
folds shook and quivered to the night wind; and when the talk grew more
earnest the jewelled forefinger snapped out little sparks of light
between the embroideries. Behind the cart was a wall of uncertain
darkness speckled with little flames and alive with half-caught forms
and faces and shadows. The voices of early evening had settled down to
one soothing hum whose deepest note was the steady chumping of the
bullocks above their chopped straw, and whose highest was the tinkle of
a Bengali dancing-girl's sitar. Most men had eaten and pulled deep at
their gurgling, grunting hookahs, which in full blast sound like
bull-frogs.

At last the lama returned. A hillman walked behind him with a wadded
cotton-quilt and spread it carefully by the fire.

'She deserves ten thousand grandchildren,' thought Kim. 'None the less,
but for me, these gifts would not have come.'

'A virtuous woman--and a wise one.' The lama slackened off, joint by
joint, like a slow camel. 'The world is full of charity to those who
follow the Way.' He flung a fair half of the quilt over Kim.

'And what said she?' Kim rolled up in his share of it.

'She asked me many questions and propounded many problems--the most of
which were idle tales which she had heard from devil-serving priests who
pretend to follow the Way. Some I answered, and some I said were
foolish. Many wear the Robe, but few keep the Way.'

'True. That is true.' Kim used the thoughtful, conciliatory tone of
those who wish to draw confidences.

'But by her lights she is most right-minded. She desires greatly that we
should go with her to Buddh Gaya; her road being ours, as I understand,
for many days' journey to the southward.'

'And?'

'Patience a little. To this I said that my Search came before all
things. She had heard many foolish legends, but this great truth of my
River she had never heard. Such are the priests of the lower hills! She
knew the Abbot of Lung-Cho, but she did not know of my River--nor the
tale of the Arrow.'

'And?'

'I spoke therefore of the Search, and of the Way, and of matters that
were profitable; she desiring only that I should accompany her and make
prayer for a second son.'

'Aha! "We women" do not think of anything save children,' said Kim
sleepily.

'Now, since our roads run together for a while, I do not see that we in
any way depart from our Search if so be we accompany her--at least as
far as--I have forgotten the name of the city.'

'Ohe!' said Kim, turning and speaking in a sharp whisper to one of the
Ooryas a few yards away. 'Where is your master's house?'

'A little behind Saharunpore, among the fruit gardens.' He named the
village.

'That was the place,' said the lama. 'So far, at least, we can go with
her.'

'Flies go to carrion,' said the Oorya, in an abstracted voice.

'For the sick cow a crow; for the sick man a Brahmin.' Kim breathed the
proverb impersonally to the shadow-tops of the trees overhead.

The Oorya grunted and held his peace.

'So then we go with her, Holy One?'

'Is there any reason against? I can still step aside and try all the
rivers that the road overpasses. She desires that I should come. She
very greatly desires it.'

Kim stifled a laugh in the quilt. When once that imperious old lady had
recovered from her natural awe of a lama he thought it probable that she
would be worth listening to.

He was nearly asleep when the lama suddenly quoted a proverb: 'The
husbands of the talkative have a great reward hereafter.' Then Kim heard
him snuff thrice, and dozed off, still laughing.

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim
sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was
seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have
it--bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of
bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food,
and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist
swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant
river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went
to work. India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake
and more excited than any one, chewing on a twig that he would presently
use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed right- and left-handedly from all
the customs of the country he knew and loved. There was no need to worry
about food--no need to spend a cowrie at the crowded stalls. He was the
disciple of a holy man annexed by a strong-willed old lady. All things
would be prepared for them, and when they were respectfully invited so
to do they would sit and eat. For the rest,--Kim giggled here as he
cleaned his teeth,--his hostess would rather heighten the enjoyment of
the road. He inspected her bullocks critically, as they came up grunting
and blowing under the yokes. If they went too fast--it was not
likely--there would be a pleasant seat for himself along the pole; the
lama would sit beside the driver. The escort, of course, would walk. The
old lady, equally of course, would talk a great deal, and by what he had
heard that conversation would not lack salt. She was already ordering,
haranguing, rebuking, and, it must be said, cursing her servants for
delays.

'Get her her pipe. In the name of the Gods, get her her pipe and stop
her ill-omened mouth,' cried an Oorya, tying up his shapeless bundles of
bedding. 'She and the parrots are alike. They screech in the dawn.'

'The lead-bullocks! Hai! Look to the lead-bullocks!' They were backing
and wheeling as a grain-cart's axle caught them by the horns. 'Son of an
owl, where dost thou go?' This to the grinning carter.

'Ai! Yai! Yai! That within there is the Queen of Delhi going to pray
for a son,' the man called back over his high load. 'Room for the Queen
of Delhi and her prime minister the gray monkey climbing up his own
sword!' Another cart loaded with bark for a down-country tannery
followed close behind, and its driver added a few compliments as the
ruth-bullocks backed and backed again.

From behind the shaking curtains came one volley of invective. It did
not last long, but in kind and quality, in blistering, biting
appropriateness, it was beyond anything that even Kim had heard. He
could see the carter's bare chest collapse with amazement, as the man
salaamed reverently to the voice, leaped from the pole, and helped the
escort haul their volcano on to the main road. Here the voice told him
truthfully what sort of wife he had wedded, and what she was doing in
his absence.

'Oh, shabash!' murmured Kim, unable to contain himself, as the man slunk
away.

'Well done, indeed? It is a shame and a scandal that a poor woman may
not go to make prayer to her gods except she be jostled and insulted by
all the refuse of Hindustan--that she must eat gali (abuse) as men eat
ghi. But I have yet a wag left to my tongue--a word or two well spoken
that serves the occasion. And still am I without my tobacco! Who is the
one-eyed and luckless son of shame that has not yet prepared my pipe?'

It was hastily thrust in by a hillman, and a trickle of thick smoke from
each corner of the curtains showed that peace was restored.

If Kim had walked proudly the day before, disciple of a holy man, to-day
he paced with tenfold pride in the train of a semi-royal procession,
with a recognised place under the patronage of an old lady of charming
manners and infinite resource. The escort, their heads tied up native
fashion, fell in on either side the cart, shuffling enormous clouds of
dust.

The lama and Kim walked a little to one side; Kim chewing his stick of
sugar-cane, and making way for no one under the status of a priest. They
could hear the old lady's tongue clack as steadily as a rice-husker. She
bade the escort tell her what was going on on the road; and so soon as
they were clear of the parao she flung back the curtains and peered out,
her veil a third across her face. Her men did not eye her directly when
she addressed them, and thus the proprieties were more or less observed.

A dark, sallowish District Superintendent of Police, faultlessly
uniformed, an Englishman, trotted by on a tired horse, and, seeing from
her retinue what manner of person she was, chaffed her.

'O mother,' he cried, 'do they do this in the zenanas? Suppose an
Englishman came by and saw that thou hadst no nose?'

'What?' she shrilled back. 'Thy own mother has no nose? Why say so,
then, on the open road?'

It was a fair counter. The Englishman threw up his hand with the gesture
of a man hit at sword-play. She laughed and nodded.

'Is this a face to tempt virtue aside?' She withdrew all her veil and
stared at him.

It was by no means lovely, but as the man gathered up his reins he
called it a Moon of Paradise, a Disturber of Integrity, and a few other
fantastic epithets which doubled her up with mirth.

'That is a nut-cut' (rogue), she said. 'All police-constables are
nut-cuts; but the police-wallahs are the worst. Hai, my son, thou hast
never learned all that since thou camest from Belait (Europe). Who
suckled thee?'

'A pahareen--a hillwoman of Dalhousie, my mother. Keep thy beauty under
a shade--O Dispenser of Delights,' and he was gone.

'These be the sort'--she took a fine judicial tone, and stuffed her
mouth with pan. 'These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the
land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe,
suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse
than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings.' Then she told a long, long
tale to the world at large, of an ignorant young policeman who had
disturbed some small Hill Rajah, a ninth cousin of her own, in the
matter of a trivial land-case, winding up with a quotation from a work
by no means devotional.

Then her mood changed, and she bade one of the escort ask whether the
lama would walk alongside and discuss matters of religion. So Kim
dropped back into the dust and returned to his sugar-cane. For an hour
or more the lama's tam-o'-shanter showed like a moon through the haze;
and, from all he heard, Kim gathered that the old woman wept. One of the
Ooryas half apologised for his rudeness overnight, saying that he had
never known his mistress of so bland a temper, and he ascribed it to the
presence of the strange priest. Personally, he believed in Brahmins,
though, like all natives, he was acutely aware of their cunning and
their greed. Still, when Brahmins but irritated with begging demands the
mother of his master's wife, and when she sent them away so angry that
they cursed the whole retinue (which was the real reason of the second
off-side bullock going lame, and of the pole breaking the night before),
he was prepared to accept any priest of any other denomination in or out
of India. To this Kim assented with wise nods, and bade the Oorya
observe that the lama took no money, and that the cost of his and Kim's
food would be repaid a hundred times in the good luck that would attend
the caravan henceforward. He also told stories of Lahore city, and sang
a song or two which made the escort laugh. As a town-mouse well
acquainted with the latest songs by the most fashionable
composers,--they are women for the most part,--Kim had a distinct
advantage over men from a little fruit-village behind Saharunpore, but
he let that advantage be inferred.

At noon they, turned aside to eat, and the meal was good, plentiful, and
well served on plates of clean leaves, in decency, out of drift of the
dust. They gave the scraps to certain beggars, that all requirements
might be fulfilled, and sat down to a long, luxurious smoke. The old
lady had retreated behind her curtains, but mixed most freely in the
talk, her servants arguing with and contradicting her as servants do
throughout the East. She compared the cool and the pines of the Kangra
and Kulu hills with the dust and the mangoes of the South; she told a
tale of some old local Gods at the edge of her husband's territory; she
roundly abused the tobacco which she was then smoking, reviled all
Brahmins, and speculated without reserve on the coming of many
grandsons.




CHAPTER V

          Here come I to my own again--
          Fed, forgiven, and known again--
          Claimed by bone of my bone again,
              And sib to flesh of my flesh!
          The fatted calf is dressed for me,
          But the husks have greater zest for me . . .
          I think my pigs will be best for me,
              So I'm off to the styes afresh.
                                   'The Prodigal Son.'


ONCE more the lazy, string-tied, shuffling procession got under way, and
she slept till they reached the next halting-stage. It was a very short
march, and time lacked an hour to sundown, so Kim cast about for means
of amusement.

'But why not sit and rest?' said one of the escort. 'Only the devils and
the English walk to and fro without reason.'

'Never make friends with the Devil, a monkey, or a boy. No man knows
what they will do next,' said his fellow.

Kim turned a scornful back--he did not want to hear the old story how
the Devil played with the boys and repented of it--and walked idly
across country.

The lama strode after him. All that day, whenever they passed a stream,
he had turned aside to look at it, but in no case had he received any
warning that he had found his River. Insensibly too the comfort of
speaking to some one in a reasonable tongue, and of being properly
considered and respected as her spiritual adviser by a well-born woman,
had weaned his thoughts a little from the Search. And further, he was
prepared to spend serene years in his quest; having nothing of the white
man's impatience, but a great faith.

'Where goest thou?' he called after Kim.

'No whither--it was a small march, and all this'--Kim waved his hands
abroad--'is new to me.'

'She is beyond question a wise and a discerning woman. But it is hard to
meditate when--'

'All women are thus.' Kim spoke as might have Solomon.

'Before the lamassery was a broad platform,' the lama muttered, looping
up the well-worn rosary, 'of stone. On that I have left the marks of my
feet--pacing to and fro with these.'

He clicked the beads, and began the 'Om mane pudme hum' of his devotion;
grateful for the cool, the quiet, and the absence of dust.

One thing after another drew Kim's idle eye across the plain. There was
no purpose in his wanderings, except that the build of the huts near by
seemed new, and he wished to investigate.

They came out on a broad tract of grazing-ground, brown and purple in
the afternoon light, with a heavy clump of mangoes in the centre. It
struck Kim as curious that no shrine stood in so eligible a spot: the
boy was observing as any priest for these things. Far across the plain
walked side by side four men, made small by the distance. He looked
intently under his curved palms and caught the sheen of brass.

'Soldiers. White soldiers!' said he. 'Let us see.'

'It is always soldiers when thou and I go out alone together. But I have
never seen the white soldiers.'

'They do no harm except when they are drunk. Keep behind this tree.'

They stepped behind the thick trunks in the cool dark of the mango-tope.
Two little figures halted; the other two came forward uncertainly. They
were the advance-party of a regiment on the march, sent out, as usual,
to mark the camp. They bore five-foot sticks with fluttering flags, and
called to each other as they spread over the flat earth.

At last they entered the mango-grove, walking heavily.

'It's here or hereabouts--officers' tents under the trees, I take it,
an' the rest of us can stay outside. Have they marked out for the
baggage-waggons behind?'

They cried again to their comrades in the distance, and the rough answer
came back faint and mellowed.

'Shove the flag in here, then,' said one.

'What do they prepare?' said the lama, wonder-struck. 'This is a great
and terrible world. What is the device on the flag?'

A soldier thrust a stave within a few feet of them, grunted
discontentedly, pulled it up again, conferred with his companion, who
looked up and down the shaded cave of greenery, and returned it.

Kim stared with all his eyes, his breath coming short and sharp between
his teeth. The soldiers stamped off into the sunshine.

'O Holy One,' he gasped, 'my horoscope! The drawing in the dust by the
priest at Umballa! Remember what he said. First come two--ferashes--to
make all things ready--in a dark place, as it is always at the beginning
of a vision.'

'But this is not vision,' said the lama. 'It is the world's Illusion,
and no more.'

'And after them comes the Bull--the Red Bull on the green field. Look!
It is he!'

He pointed to the flag that was snap-snapping in the evening breeze not
ten feet away. It was no more than an ordinary camp marking-flag; but
the regiment, always punctilious in matters of millinery, had charged it
with the regimental device, the Red Bull, which is the crest of the
Mavericks--the great Red Bull on a background of Irish green.

'I see, and now I remember,' said the lama. 'Certainly it is thy Bull.
Certainly, also, the two men came to make all ready.'

'They are soldiers--white soldiers. What said the priest? "The sign over
against the Bull is the sign of War and armed men." Holy One, this thing
touches my Search.'

'True. It is true.' The lama stared fixedly at the device that flamed
like a ruby in the dusk. 'The priest at Umballa said that thine was the
sign of War.'

'What is to do now?'

'Wait. Let us wait.'

'Even now the darkness clears,' said Kim. It was only natural that the
descending sun should at last strike through the tree-trunks, across the
grove, filling it with mealy gold light for a few minutes; but to Kim it
was crown of the Umballa Brahmin's prophecy.

'Hark!' said the lama. 'One beats a drum--far off!'

At first the sound, carrying diluted through the still air, resembled
the beating of an artery in the head. Soon a sharpness was added.

'Ah! The music,' Kim explained. He knew the sound of a regimental band,
but it amazed the lama.

At the far end of the plain a heavy, dusty column crawled in sight. Then
the wind brought the tune:--

              'We crave your condescension
              To tell you what we know
          Of marching in the Mulligan Guards
              To Sligo Port below.'

Here broke in the shrill-tongued fifes:--

                  'We shouldered arms,
                  We marched--we marched away
                  From Phoenix Park
                  We marched to Dublin Bay.
                  The drums and the fifes,
                  Oh, sweetly they did play,
          As we marched--marched--marched--with the Mulligan Guards!'

It was the band of the Mavericks playing the regiment to camp; for the
men were route-marching with their baggage. The rippling column swung
into the level--carts behind it--divided left and right, ran about like
an ant-hill, and . . .

But this is sorcery!' said the lama.

The plain dotted itself with tents that seemed to rise, all spread, from
the carts. Another rush of men invaded the grove, pitched a huge tent in
silence, ran up yet eight or nine more by the side of it, unearthed
cooking-pots, pans, and bundles, which were taken possession of by a
crowd of native servants; and behold the mango-tope turned into an
orderly town as they watched!

'Let us go,' said the lama, sinking back afraid, as the fires twinkled
and white officers with jingling swords stalked into the mess-tent.

'Stand back in the shadow. No one can see beyond the light of a fire,'
said Kim, his eyes still on the flag. He had never before watched the
routine of a seasoned regiment pitching camp in thirty minutes.

'Look! look! look!' clucked the lama. 'Yonder comes a priest.'

It was Bennett, the Church of England chaplain of the regiment, limping
in dusty black. One of his flock had made some rude remarks about the
chaplain's mettle; and to abash him Bennett had marched step by step
with the men that day. The black dress, gold cross on the watch-chain,
the hairless face, and the soft, black wideawake hat would have marked
him as a holy man anywhere in all India. He dropped into a camp-chair by
the door of the mess-tent and slid off his boots. Three or four officers
gathered round him, laughing and joking over his exploit.

'The talk of white men is wholly lacking in dignity,' said the lama, who
judged only by tone. 'But I have considered the countenance of that
priest, and I think he is learned. Is it likely that he will understand
our talk? I would talk to him of my Search.'

'Never speak to a white man till he is fed,' said Kim, quoting a
well-known proverb. 'They will eat now, and--and I do not think they are
good to beg from. Let us go back to the resting-place. After we have
eaten we will come again. It certainly was a Red Bull--my Red Bull.'

They were both noticeably absent-minded when the old lady's retinue set
their meal before them; so none broke their reserve, for it is not lucky
to annoy guests.

'Now,' said Kim, picking his teeth, 'we will return to that place; but
thou, O Holy One, must wait a little way off, because thy feet are
heavier than mine and I am anxious to see more of that Red Bull.'

'But how canst thou understand the talk? Walk slowly. The road is dark,'
the lama replied uneasily.

Kim put the question aside. 'I marked a place near to the trees,' said
he, 'where thou canst sit till I call. Nay,' as the lama made some sort
of protest, 'remember this is my Search--the Search for my Red Bull. The
sign in the Stars was not for thee. I know a little of the customs of
white soldiers, and I always desire to see some new things.'

'What dost thou not know of this world?' The lama squatted obediently in
a little hollow of the ground not a hundred yards from the hump of the
mango trees dark against the star-powdered sky.

'Stay till I call.' Kim flitted into the dusk. He knew that in all
probability there would be sentries round the camp, and smiled to
himself as he heard the thick boots of one. A boy who can dodge over the
roofs of Lahore city on a moonlight night, using every little patch and
corner of darkness to discomfit his pursuer, is not likely to be checked
by a line of well-trained soldiers. He paid them the compliment of
crawling between a couple, and, running and halting, crouching and
dropping flat, worked his way toward the lighted mess-tent where, close
pressed behind the mango tree, he waited till some chance word should
give him a returnable lead.

The one thing in his mind now was further information as to the Red
Bull. For aught he knew, and Kim's limitations were as curious and
sudden as his expansions, the men, the nine hundred thorough devils of
his father's prophecy, might pray to the beast after dark, as Hindus
pray to the Holy Cow. That at least would be entirely right and logical,
and the Padre with the gold cross would be therefore the man to consult
in the matter. On the other hand, remembering sober-faced padres whom he
had avoided in Lahore city, the priest might be an inquisitive nuisance
who would bid him learn. But had it not been proven at Umballa that his
sign in the high heavens portended war and armed men? Was he not the
Friend of the Stars as well as of all the world, crammed to the teeth
with dreadful secrets? Lastly,--and firstly as the undercurrent of all
his quick thoughts,--this adventure, though he did not know the English
word, was a stupendous lark--a delightful continuation of his old
flights across the housetops, as well as the fulfilment of sublime
prophecy. He lay belly-flat and wriggled towards the mess-tent door, a
hand on the amulet round his neck.

It was as he suspected. The Sahibs prayed to their God; for in the
centre of the mess-table--its sole ornament when they were on the line
of march--stood a golden bull fashioned from old-time loot of the Summer
Palace at Pekin--a red-gold bull with lowered head, ramping upon a field
of Irish green. To him the Sahibs held out their glasses and cried aloud
confusedly.

Now the Reverend Arthur Bennett always left mess after that toast, and
being rather tired by his march his movements were more abrupt than
usual. Kim, with slightly raised head, was still staring at his totem on
the table, when the chaplain stepped on his right shoulder-blade. Kim
flinched under the leather, and, rolling sideways, brought down the
chaplain, who, ever a man of action, caught him by the throat and nearly
choked the life out of him. Kim then kicked him desperately in the
stomach. Mr. Bennett gasped and doubled up but without relaxing his
grip, rolled over again, and silently hauled Kim to his own tent. The
Mavericks were incurable practical jokers; and it occurred to the
Englishman that silence was best till he had made complete inquiry.

'Why, it's a boy!' he said, as he drew his prize under the light of the
tent-pole lantern, then shaking him severely cried: 'What were you
doing? You're a thief. Choor? Mallum?' His Hindustanee was very limited,
and the ruffled and disgusted Kim intended to keep to the character laid
down for him. As he recovered his breath he was inventing a beautifully
plausible tale of his relations to some mess-scullion, and at the same
time keeping a keen eye on and a little under the chaplain's left
armpit. The chance came; he ducked for the doorway, but a long arm shot
out and clutched at his neck, snapping the amulet string and closing on
the amulet.

'Give it me. O give it me. Is it lost? Give me the papers.'

The words were in English--the tinny, saw-cut English of the
native-bred, and the chaplain jumped.

'A scapular,' said he, opening his hand. 'No, some sort of heathen
charm. Why--why, do you speak English? Little boys who steal are beaten.
You know that?'

'I do not--I did not steal.' Kim danced in agony like a terrier at a
lifted stick. 'O give it me. It is my charm. Do not thieve it from me.'

The chaplain took no heed, but, going to the tent door, called aloud. A
fattish, clean-shaven man appeared.

'I want your advice, Father Victor,' said Bennett. 'I found this boy in
the dark outside the mess-tent. Ordinarily, I should have chastised him
and let him go, because I believe him to be a thief. But it seems he
talks English, and he attaches some sort of value to a charm round his
neck. I thought perhaps you might help me.'

Between himself and the Roman Catholic chaplain of the Irish contingent
lay, as Bennett believed, an unbridgeable gulf, but it was noticeable
that whenever the Church of England dealt with a human problem she was
likely to call in the Church of Rome. Bennett's official abhorrence of
the Scarlet Woman and all her ways was only equalled by his private
respect for Father Victor.

'A thief talking English is it? Let's look at his charm. No, it's not a
scapular, Bennett.' He held out his hand.

'But have we any right to open it? A sound whipping--'

'I did not thieve,' protested Kim. 'You have hit me kicks all over my
body. Now give me my charm and I will go away.'

'Not quite so fast; we'll look first,' said Father Victor, leisurely
rolling out poor Kimball O'Hara's 'ne varietur' parchment, his
clearance-certificate, and Kim's baptismal certificate. On this last
O'Hara--with some confused idea that he was doing wonders for his
son--had scrawled scores of times: 'Look after the boy. Please look
after the boy,'--signing his name and regimental number in full.

'Powers of Darkness below!' said Father Victor, passing all over to Mr.
Bennett. 'Do you know what these things are?'

'Yes,' said Kim. 'They are mine, and I want to go away.'

'I do not quite understand,' said Mr. Bennett. 'He probably brought them
on purpose. It may be a begging trick of some kind.'

'I never saw a beggar less anxious to stay with his company, then.
There's the makings of a gay mystery here. Ye believe in Providence,
Bennett?'

'I hope so.'

'Well, I believe in miracles, so it comes to the same thing. Powers of
Darkness! Kimball O'Hara! And his son! But then he's a native, and I saw
Kimball married myself to Annie Shott. How long have you had these
things, boy?'

'Ever since I was a little baby.' Father Victor stepped forward quickly
and opened the front of Kim's upper garment. 'You see, Bennett, he's not
very black. What's your name?'

'Kim.'

'Or Kimball?'

'Perhaps. Will you let me go away?'

'What else?'

'They call me Kim Rishti ke. That is Kim of the Rishti.'

'What is that--"Rishti"?'

'Eye-rishti--that was the regiment--my father's.'

'Irish, oh I see.'

'Yess. That was how my father told me. My father, he has lived.'

'Has lived where?'

'Has lived. Of course he is dead--gone-out.'

'Oh. That's your abrupt way of putting it, is it?'

Bennett interrupted. 'It is possible I have done the boy an injustice.
He is certainly white, though evidently neglected. I am sure I must have
bruised him. I do not think spirits--'

'Get him a glass of sherry, then, and let him squat on the cot. Now,
Kim,' continued Father Victor, 'no one is going to hurt you. Drink that
down and tell us about yourself. The truth, if you've no objection.'

Kim coughed a little as he put down the empty glass, and considered.
This seemed a time for caution and fancy. Small boys who prowl about
camps are generally turned out after a whipping. But he had received no
stripes; the amulet was evidently working in his favour, and it looked
as though the Umballa horoscope and the few words that he could remember
of his father's maunderings fitted in most miraculously. Else why did
the fat padre seem so impressed, and why the glass of hot yellow wine
from the lean one?

'My father, he is dead in Lahore city since I was very little. The
woman, she kept kabarri-shop near where the hire-carriages are.' Kim
began with a plunge, not quite sure how far the truth would serve him.

'Your mother?'

'No'--with a gesture of disgust. 'She went out when I was born. My
father, he got these papers from the Jadoo-Gher--what do you call that?'
(Bennett nodded) 'because he was in--good-standing. What do you call
that?' (again Bennett nodded). 'My father told me that. He said too, and
also the Brahmin who made the drawing in the dust at Umballa two days
ago, he said, that I shall find a Red Bull on a green field and that the
Bull shall help me.'

'A phenomenal little liar,' muttered Bennett.

'Powers of Darkness below, what a country!' murmured Father Victor. 'Go
on, Kim.'

'I did not thieve. Besides, I am just now disciple of a very holy man.
He is sitting outside. We saw two men come with flags, making the place
ready. That is always so in a dream, or on account of a--a--prophecy. So
I knew it was come true. I saw the Red Bull on the green field, and my
father he said: "Nine hundred pukka devils and the Colonel riding on a
horse will look after you when you find the Red Bull!" I did not know
what to do when I saw the Bull, but I went away and I came again when it
was dark. I wanted to see the Bull again, and I saw the Bull again with
the--the Sahibs praying to it. I think the Bull shall help me. The holy
man said so too. He is sitting outside. Will you hurt him, if I call him
a shout now? He is very holy. He can witness to all the things I say,
and he knows I am not a thief.'

'"Officers praying to a bull!" What in the world do you make of that?'
said Bennett. '"Disciple of a holy man!" Is the boy mad?'

'It's O'Hara's boy, sure enough. O'Hara's boy leagued with all the
Powers of Darkness. It's very much what his father would have done--if
he was drunk. We'd better invite the holy man. He may know something.'

'He does not know anything,' said Kim. 'I will show you him if you come.
He is my master. Then afterwards we can go.'

'Powers of Darkness!' was all that Father Victor could say, as Bennett
marched off, with a firm hand on Kim's shoulder.

They found the lama where he had dropped.

'The Search is at an end for me,' shouted Kim in the vernacular. 'I have
found the Bull, but God knows what comes next. They will not hurt you.
Come to the fat priest's tent with this thin man and see the end. It is
all new, and they cannot talk Hindi. They are only uncurried donkeys.'

'Then it is not well to make a jest of their ignorance,' the lama
returned. 'I am glad if thou art rejoiced, chela.'

Dignified and unsuspicious, he strode into the little tent, saluted the
Churches as a Churchman, and sat down by the open charcoal brazier. The
yellow lining of the tent reflected in the lamplight made his face
red-gold.

Bennett looked at him with the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed
that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of 'heathen.'

'And what was the end of the search? What gift has the Red Bull
brought?' The lama addressed himself to Kim.

'He says, "What are you going to do?"' Bennett was staring uneasily at
Father Victor, and Kim, for his own ends, took upon himself the office
of interpreter.

'I do not see what concern this faquir has with the boy, who is probably
his dupe or his confederate,' Bennett began. 'We cannot allow an English
boy--Assuming that he is the son of a Mason, the sooner he goes to the
Masonic Orphanage the better.'

'Ah! That's your opinion as Secretary to the Regimental Lodge,' said
Father Victor; 'but we might as well tell the old man what we are going
to do. He doesn't look like a villain.'

'My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind. Now,
Kimball, I wish you to tell this man what I say--word for word.'

Kim gathered the import of the next few sentences and began thus:

'Holy One, the thin fool who looks like a camel says that I am the son
of a Sahib.'

'But how?'

'Oh, it is true. I knew it since my birth, but he could only find it out
by rending the amulet from my neck and reading all the papers. He thinks
that once a Sahib is always a Sahib, and between the two of them they
purpose to keep me in this regiment or to send me to a madrissah (a
school). It has happened before. I have always avoided it. The fat fool
is of one mind and the camel-like one of another. But that is no odds. I
may spend one night here and perhaps the next. It has happened before.
Then I will run away and return to thee.'

'But tell them that thou art my chela. Tell them how thou didst come to
me when I was faint and bewildered. Tell them of our Search, and they
will surely let thee go now.'

'I have already told them. They laugh, and they talk of the Police.'

'What are you saying?' asked Mr. Bennett.

'Oah. He only says that if you do not let me go it will stop him in his
business--his ur-gent private affairs.' This last was a reminiscence of
some talk with a Eurasian clerk in the Canal Department, but it only
drew a smile, which nettled him. 'And if you did know what his business
was you would not be in such a beastly hurry to interfere.'

'What is it then?' said Father Victor, not without feeling, as he
watched the lama's face.

'There is a River in this country which he wishes to find so verree
much. It was put out by an Arrow which--' Kim tapped his foot
impatiently as he translated in his own mind from the vernacular to his
clumsy English. 'Oah, it was made by our Lord God Buddha, you know, and
if you wash there you are washed away from all your sins and made as
white as cotton-wool.' (Kim had heard mission-talk in his time.) 'I am
his disciple, and we must find that River. It is so verree valuable to
us.'

'Say that again,' said Bennett. Kim obeyed, with amplifications.

'But this is gross blasphemy!' cried the Church of England.

'Tck! Tck!' said Father Victor sympathetically. 'I'd give a good deal to
be able to talk the vernacular. A river that washes away sin! And how
long have you two been looking for it?'

'Oh, many days. Now we wish to go away and look for it again. It is not
here, you see.'

'I see,' said Father Victor gravely. 'But he can't go on in that old
man's company. It would be different, Kim, if you were not a soldier's
son. Tell him that the regiment will take care of you and make you as
good a man as your--as good a man as can be. Tell him that if he
believes in miracles he must believe that--'

'There is no need to play on his credulity,' Bennett interrupted.

'I'm doing no such thing. He must believe that the boy's coming here--to
his own regiment--in search of his Red Bull is in the nature of a
miracle. Consider the chances against it, Bennett. This one boy in all
India, and our regiment of all others on the line o' march for him to
meet with! It's predestined on the face of it. Yes, tell him it's
Kismet. Kismet, mallum?' (Fate! Do you understand?)

He turned towards the lama, to whom he might as well have talked of
Mesopotamia.

'They say,'--the old man's eye lighted at Kim's speech,--'they say that
the meaning of my horoscope is now accomplished, and that being led
back--though as thou knowest I went out of curiosity--to these people
and their Red Bull I must needs go to a madrissah and be turned into a
Sahib. Now I make pretence of agreement, for at the worst it will be but
a few meals eaten away from thee. Then I will slip away and follow down
the road to Saharunpore. Therefore, Holy One, keep with that Kulu
woman--on no account stray far from her cart till I come again. Past
question, my sign is of War and of armed men. See how they have given me
wine to drink and set me upon a bed of honour! My father must have been
some great person. So if they raise me to honour among them, good. If
not, good again. However it goes, I will run back to thee when I am
tired. But stay with the Rajputni, or I shall miss thy feet. . . . Oah
yess,' said the boy, 'I have told him everything you tell me to say.'

'And I cannot see any need why he should wait,' said Bennett, feeling in
his trouser-pocket. 'We can investigate the details later--and I will
give him a ru--'

'Give him time. May be he's fond of the lad,' said Father Victor,
half-arresting the clergyman's motion.

The lama dragged forth his rosary and pulled his huge hat-brim over his
eyes.

'What can he want now?'

'He says'--Kim put up one hand. 'He says: Be quiett. He wants to speak
to me by himself. You see you do not know one little word of what he
says, and I think if you talk he will perhaps give you very bad curses.
When he takes those beads like that, you see he always wants to be
quiett.'

The two Englishmen sat overwhelmed, but there was a look in Bennett's
eye that promised ill for Kim when he should be relaxed to the religious
arm.

'A Sahib and the son of a Sahib--' The lama's voice was harsh with pain.
'But no white man knows the land and the customs of the land as thou
knowest. How comes it this is true?'

'What matter, Holy One: but remember it is only for a night or two.
Remember, I can change swiftly. It will all be as it was when I first
spoke to thee under Zam-Zammah the great gun--'

'As a boy in the dress of white men--when I first went to the Wonder
House. And a second time thou wast a Hindu. What shall the third
incarnation be?' He chuckled drearily. 'Ah, chela, thou hast done a
wrong to an old man because my heart went out to thee.'

'And mine to thee. But how could I know that the Red Bull would bring me
to this business?'

The lama covered his face afresh, and nervously rattled the rosary. Kim
squatted beside him and laid hold upon a fold of his clothing.

'Now it is understood that the boy is a Sahib?' he went on in a muffled
tone. 'Such a Sahib as was he who kept the images in the Wonder House.'
The lama's experience of white men was limited. He seemed to be
repeating a lesson. 'So then it is not seemly that he should do other
than as the Sahibs do. He must go back to his own people.'

'For a day and a night and a day,' Kim pleaded.

'No, ye don't!' Father Victor saw Kim edging towards the door, and
interposed a strong leg.

'I do not understand the customs of white men. The Priest of the Images
in the Wonder House in Lahore was more courteous than the thin one here.
This boy will be taken from me. They will make a Sahib of my disciple?
Woe to me, how shall I find my River? Have they no disciples? Ask.'

'He says he is very sorry that he cannot find the River now any more. He
says, Why have you no disciples, and stop bothering him? He wants to be
washed of his sins.'

Neither Bennett nor Father Victor found any answer ready.

Said Kim in English, distressed for the lama's agony: 'I think if you
will let me go now we will walk away quietly and not steal. We will look
for that River like before I was caught. I wish I did not come here to
find the Red Bull and all that sort of thing. I do not want it.'

'It's the very best day's work you ever did for yourself, young man,'
said Bennett.

'Good heavens, I don't know how to console him,' said Father Victor,
watching the lama intently. 'He can't take the boy away with him, and
yet he's a good man--I'm sure he's a good man. Bennett, if you give him
that rupee he'll curse you root and branch!'

They listened to each other's breathing--three--five full minutes. Then
the lama raised his head, and looked forth across them into space and
emptiness.

'And I am a follower of the Way,' he said bitterly. 'The sin is mine and
the punishment is mine. I made believe to myself--for now I see it was
but make-belief--that thou wast sent to me to aid in the Search. So my
heart went out to thee for thy charity and thy courtesy and the wisdom
of thy little years. But those who follow the Way must permit not the
fire of any desire or attachment, for that is all illusion. As says . . .'
He quoted an old, old Chinese text, backed it with another, and
reinforced these with a third. 'I stepped aside from the Way, my chela.
It was no fault of thine. I delighted in the sight of life, the new
people upon the roads, and in thy joy at seeing these things. I was
pleased with thee who should have considered my Search and my Search
alone. Now I am sorrowful because thou art taken away and my River is
far from me. It is the Law which I have broken!'

'Powers of Darkness below!' said Father Victor, who, wise in the
confessional, heard the pain in every sentence.

'I see now that the sign of the Red Bull was a sign for me as well as
for thee. All Desire is red--and evil. I will do penance and find my
River alone.'

'At least go back to the Kulu woman,' said Kim, 'otherwise thou wilt be
lost upon the roads. She will feed thee till I run back to thee.'

The lama waved a hand to show that the matter was finally settled in his
mind.

'Now,'--his tone altered as he turned to Kim,--'what will they do with
thee? At least I may, acquiring merit, wipe out past ill.'

'Make me a Sahib--so they think. The day after to-morrow I return. Do
not grieve.'

'Of what sort? Such an one as this or that man?' He pointed to Father
Victor. 'Such an one as those I saw this evening--men wearing swords and
stamping heavily?'

'Maybe.'

'That is not well. These men follow desire and come to emptiness. Thou
must not be of their sort.'

'The Umballa priest said that my Star was War,' Kim interjected. 'I will
ask these fools--but there is truly no need. I will run away this night,
for all I wanted to see the new things.'

Kim put two or three questions in English to Father Victor, translating
the replies to the lama.

Then: 'He says, "You take him from me and you cannot say what you will
make him." He says, "Tell me before I go, for it is not a small thing to
make a child."'

'You will be sent to a school. Later on, we shall see. Kimball, I
suppose you'd like to be a soldier?'

'Gorah-log (white-folk). No-ah! No-ah!' Kim shook his head violently.
There was nothing in his composition to which drill and routine
appealed. 'I will not be a soldier.'

'You will be what you're told to be,' said Bennett; and you should be
grateful that we're going to help you.'

Kim smiled compassionately. If these men lay under the delusion that he
would do anything that he did not fancy, so much the better.

Another long silence followed. Bennett fidgeted with impatience, and
suggested calling a sentry to evict the faquir.

'Do they give or sell learning among the Sahibs? Ask them,' said the
lama, and Kim interpreted.

'They say that money is paid to the teacher--but that money the regiment
will give. . . . What need? It is only for a night.'

'And--the more money is paid the better learning is given?' The lama
disregarded Kim's plans for an early flight. 'It is no wrong to pay for
learning; to help the ignorant to wisdom is always a merit.' The rosary
clicked furiously as an abacus. Then he faced his oppressors.

'Ask them for how much money do they give a wise and suitable teaching?
and in what city is that teaching given?'

'Well,' said Father Victor in English, when Kim had translated, 'that
depends. The regiment would pay for you all the time you are at the
Military Orphanage; or you might go on the Punjab Masonic Orphanage's
list (not that he or you'ud understand what that means); but the best
schooling a boy can get in India is, of course, at St. Xavier's in
Partibus at Lucknow.' This took some time to interpret, for Bennett
wished to cut it short.

'He wants to know how much?' said Kim placidly.

'Two or three hundred rupees a year.' Father Victor was long past any
sense of amazement. Bennett, impatient, did not understand.

'He says: "Write that name and the money upon a paper and give it him."
And he says you must write your name below, because he is going to write
a letter in some days to you. He says you are a good man. He says the
other man is a fool. He is going away.'

The lama rose suddenly. 'I follow my Search,' he cried, and was gone.

'He'll run slap into the sentries,' cried Father Victor, jumping up as
the lama stalked out; 'but I can't leave the boy.' Kim made swift motion
to follow, but checked himself. There was no sound of challenge outside.
The lama had disappeared.

Kim settled himself composedly on the chaplain's cot. At least the lama
had promised that he would stay with the Rajput woman from Kulu, and the
rest was of the smallest importance. It pleased him that the two padres
were so evidently excited. They talked long in undertones, Father Victor
urging some scheme on Mr. Bennett, who seemed incredulous. All this was
very new and fascinating, but Kim felt sleepy. They called men into the
tent--one of them certainly was the Colonel, as his father had
prophesied--and they asked him an infinity of questions, chiefly about
the woman who looked after him, all of which Kim answered truthfully.
They did not seem to think the woman a good guardian.

After all, this was the newest of his experiences. Sooner or later, if
he chose, he could escape into great, gray, formless India, beyond tents
and padres and colonels. Meantime, if the Sahibs were to be impressed,
he would do his best to impress them. He too was a white man.

After much talk that he could not comprehend, they handed him over to a
sergeant, who had strict instructions not to let him escape. The
regiment would go on to Umballa, and Kim would be sent up, partly at the
expense of the Lodge and in part by subscription, to a place called
Sanawar.

'It's miraculous past all whooping, Colonel,' said Father Victor, when
he had talked without a break for ten minutes. 'His Buddhist friend has
levanted after taking my name and address. I can't quite make out
whether he'll pay for the boy's education or whether he is preparing
some sort of witchcraft on his own account.' Then to Kim: 'You'll live
to be grateful to your friend the Red Bull yet. We'll make a man of you
at Sanawar--even at the price o' making you a Protestant.'

'Certainly--most certainly,' said Bennett.

'But you will not go to Sanawar,' said Kim.

'But we will go to Sanawar, little man. That's the order of the
Commander-in-Chief, who's a trifle more important than O'Hara's son.'

'You will not go to Sanawar. You will go to thee war.'

There was a shout of laughter from the full tent.

'When you know your own regiment a trifle better you won't confuse the
line of march with line of battle, Kim. We hope to go to "thee war"
sometime.'

'Oah, I know all thatt.' Kim drew his bow again at a venture. If they
were not going to the war, at least they did not know what he knew of
the talk in the veranda at Umballa.

'I know you are not at thee war now; but I tell you that as soon as you
get to Umballa you will be sent to the war--the new war. It is a war of
eight thousand men, besides the guns.'

'That's explicit. D'you add prophecy to your other gifts? Take him
along, Sergeant. Take up a suit for him from the Drums, an' take care he
doesn't slip through your fingers. Who says the age of miracles is gone
by? I think I'll go to bed. My poor mind's weakening.'

At the far end of the camp, silent as a wild animal, an hour later sat
Kim, newly washed all over, in a horrible stuff suit that rasped his
arms and legs.

'A most amazin' young bird,' said the Sergeant. 'He turns up in charge
of a yellow-headed buck-Brahmin priest, with his father's Lodge
certificates round his neck, talkin' God knows what all of a red bull.
The buck-Brahmin evaporates without explanations, an' the bhoy sets
cross-legged on the chaplain's bed prophesyin' bloody war to the men at
large. Injia's a wild land for a God-fearin' man. I'll just tie his leg
to the tent-pole in case he'll go through the roof. What did ye say
about the war?'

'Eight thousand men, besides guns,' said Kim. 'Very soon you will see.'

'You're a consolin' little imp. Lie down between the Drums an' go to
bye-bye. Those two boys beside ye will watch your slumbers.'




CHAPTER VI

          Now I remember comrades--
            Old playmates on new seas--
          Whenas we traded orpiment
            Among the savages.
          Ten thousand leagues to southward,
            And thirty years removed--
          They knew not noble Valdez,
            But me they knew and loved.
                        'Song of Diego Valdez.'


VERY early in the morning the white tents came down and disappeared as
the Mavericks took a side road to Umballa. It did not skirt the
resting-place, and Kim, trudging beside a baggage-cart under fire of
comments from soldiers' wives, was not so confident as over-night. He
discovered that he was closely watched--Father Victor on the one side,
and Mr. Bennett on the other.

In the forenoon the column checked. A camel-orderly handed the Colonel a
letter. He read it, and spoke to a major. Half a mile in the rear, Kim
heard a hoarse and joyful clamour rolling down on him through the thick
dust. Then some one beat him on the back, crying: 'Tell us how ye knew,
ye little limb of Satan? Father dear, see if ye can make him tell.'

A pony ranged alongside, and he was hauled on to the priest's
saddle-bow.

'Now, my son, your prophecy of last night has come true. Our orders are
to entrain at Umballa for the front to-morrow.'

'What is thatt?' said Kim, for 'front' and 'entrain' were newish words
to him.

'We are going to "thee war," as you called it.'

'Of course you are going to thee war. I said last night.'

'Ye did; but, Powers o' Darkness, how did ye know?'

Kim's eyes sparkled. He shut his lips, nodded his head, and looked
unspeakable things. The chaplain moved on through the dust, and
privates, sergeants, and subalterns called one another's attention to
the boy. The Colonel, at the head of the column, stared at him
curiously. 'It was probably some bazar rumour,' he said; 'but even
then--' He referred to the paper in his hand. 'Hang it all, the thing
was only decided within the last forty-eight hours.'

'Are there many more like you in India?' said Father Victor, 'or are you
by way o' being a lusus naturae?'

'Now I have told you,' said the boy, 'will you let me go back to my old
man? If he has not stayed with that woman from Kulu, I am afraid he will
die.'

'By what I saw of him he's as well able to take care of himself as you.
No. Ye've brought us luck, an' we're goin' to make a man of you. I'll
take ye back to your baggage-cart and ye'll come to me this evening.'

For the rest of the day Kim found himself an object of distinguished
consideration among a few hundred white men. The story of his appearance
in camp, the discovery of his parentage, and his prophecy, had lost
nothing in the telling. A big, shapeless white woman on a pile of
bedding asked him mysteriously whether he thought her husband would come
back from the war. Kim reflected gravely, and said that he would, and
the woman gave him food. In many respects, this big procession that
played music at intervals--this crowd that talked and laughed so
easily--resembled a festival in Lahore city. So far, there was no sign
of hard work, and he resolved to lend the spectacle his patronage. At
evening there came out to meet them bands of music, and played the
Mavericks into camp near Umballa railway station. That was an
interesting night. Men of other regiments came to visit the Mavericks.
The Mavericks went visiting on their own account. Their pickets hurried
forth to bring them back, met pickets of strange regiments on the same
duty; and, after a while, the bugles blew madly for more pickets with
officers to control the tumult. The Mavericks had a reputation for
liveliness to live up to. But they fell in on the platform next morning
in perfect shape and condition; and Kim, left behind with the sick,
women, and boys, found himself shouting farewells excitedly as the
trains drew away. Life as a Sahib was amusing so far; but he touched it
with a cautious hand. Then they marched him back in charge of a
drummer-boy to empty, lime-washed barracks, whose floors were covered
with rubbish and string and paper, and whose ceilings gave back his
lonely footfall. Native fashion, he curled himself up on a stripped cot
and went to sleep. An angry man stumped down the veranda, woke him up,
and said he was a schoolmaster. This was enough for Kim, and he retired
into his shell. He could just puzzle out the various English Police
notices in Lahore city, because they affected his comfort; and among the
many guests of the woman who looked after him had been a queer German
who painted scenery for the Parsee travelling theatre. He told Kim that
he had been 'on the barricades in Forty-eight,' and therefore--at least
that was how it struck Kim--he would teach the boy to write in return
for food. Kim had been kicked as far as single letters, but did not
think well of them.

'I do not know anything. Go away!' said Kim, scenting evil. Hereupon the
man caught him by the ear, dragged him to a room in a far-off wing where
a dozen drummer-boys were sitting on forms, and told him to be still if
he could do nothing else. This he managed very successfully. The man
explained something or other with white lines on a black board for at
least half an hour, and Kim continued his interrupted nap. He much
disapproved of the present aspect of affairs, for this was the very
school and discipline he had spent two-thirds of his young life in
avoiding. Suddenly a beautiful idea occurred to him, and he wondered
that he had not thought of it before.

The man dismissed them, and first to spring through the veranda into the
open sunshine was Kim.

''Ere you! 'Alt! Stop!' said a high voice at his heels. 'I've got to
look after you. My orders are not to let you out of my sight. Where are
you goin'?'

It was the drummer-boy who had been hanging round him all the
forenoon--a fat and freckled person of about fourteen, and Kim loathed
him from the soles of his boots to his cap-ribbons.

'To the bazar--to get sweets--for you,' said Kim, after thought.

'Well, the bazar's out o' bounds. If we go there we'll get a
dressing-down. You come back.'

'How near can we go?' Kim did not know what bounds meant, but he wished
to be polite--for the present.

''Ow near? 'Ow far, you mean? We can go as far as that tree down the
road.'

'Then I will go there.'

'All right. I ain't goin'. It's too 'ot. I can watch you from 'ere. It's
no good runnin' away. If you did, they'd spot you by your clothes.
That's regimental stuff you're wearin'. There ain't a picket in Umballa
wouldn't 'ead you back quicker than you started out.'

This did not impress Kim as much as the knowledge that his raiment would
tire him out if he tried to run. He slouched to the tree at the corner
of a bare road leading towards the bazar, and eyed the natives passing.
Most of them were barrack-servants of the lowest caste. Kim hailed a
sweeper, who promptly retorted with a piece of unnecessary insolence, in
the natural belief that the European boy could not follow. The low,
quick answer undeceived him. Kim put his fettered soul into it, thankful
for the late chance to abuse somebody in the tongue he knew best. 'And
now, go to the nearest letter-writer in the bazar and tell him to come
here. I would write a letter.'

'But--but what manner of white man's son art thou, to need a bazar
letter-writer? Is there not a schoolmaster in the barracks?'

'Ay; and Hell is full of the same sort. Do my order, you--you Od! Thy
mot

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