'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 faquir 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 before. I have always avoided it. The fat fool is of one mind and the camel-like one of another. But that is no odds. I may spend one night here and perhaps the next. It has happened before. Then I will run away and return to thee.' 'But tell them that thou art my chela. Tell them how thou didst come to me when I was faint and bewildered. Tell them of our Search, and they will surely let thee go now.' 'I have already told them. They laugh, and they talk of the Police.' 'What are you saying?' asked Mr. Bennett. 'Oah. He only says that if you do not let me go it will stop him in his business--his ur-gent private affairs.' This last was a reminiscence of some talk with a Eurasian clerk in the Canal Department, but it only drew a smile, which nettled him. 'And if you did know what his business was you would not be in such a beastly hurry to interfere.'