“Go thy way, Friend of all the World,” piped the old soldier, wheeling his scrawny mount. “For once in all my days I have met a true prophet—who was not in the Army.”
Father and son swung round together: the old man sitting as erect as the younger.
A Punjabi constable in yellow linen trousers slouched across the road. He had seen the money pass.
“Halt!” he cried in impressive English. “Know ye not that there is a takkus of two annas a head, which is four annas, on those who enter the Road from this side-road? It is the order of the Sirkar, and the money is spent for the planting of trees and the beautification of the ways.”
“And the bellies of the police,” said Kim, slipping out of arm’s reach. “Consider for a while, man with a mud head. Think you we came from the nearest pond like the frog, thy father-in-law? Hast thou ever heard the name of thy brother?”
“And who was he? Leave the boy alone,” cried a senior constable, immensely delighted, as he squatted down to smoke his pipe in the veranda.
“He took a label from a bottle of belaitee-pani (soda-water), and, affixing it to a bridge, collected taxes for a month from those who passed, saying that it was the Sirkar’s order. Then came an Englishman and broke his head. Ah, brother, I am a town-crow, not a village-crow!”
The policeman drew back abashed, and Kim hooted at him all down the road.
“Was there ever such a disciple as I?” he cried merrily to the lama. “All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of Lahore city if I had not guarded thee.”
“I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or sometimes an evil imp,” said the lama, smiling slowly.