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.'
``Sahibs 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 fakir 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