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

Kim (Kimball O’Hara) is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier (Kimball O’Hara sr., a former colour sergeant and later an employee of an indian railway company) and a poor Irish mother (a former nanny in a colonel’s household) who have both died in poverty.

Kim is so immersed in the local culture that few realise he is a white child, although he carries a packet of documents from his father entrusted to him by an Indian woman who cared for him.