‘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 waterpipe, 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 fakirs 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 lowcaste 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 Ravi.  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.