‘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,’ 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 Srinagar 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.