. 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
Hindustani, '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 someone--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 coconut-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
Such-zen, 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,' w