Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/83

Rh '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 toward 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 glad to be rid of them, and the priest's farewell was cold and distant. He had wasted good 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 him. He marches well, too.'

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