"I'll arrange to go up with you very soon, Bobby. It's a hard ride through the pass and--and there may be a lot of goblins up there where the old woman keeps herself."
The witch's hovel was in the mountain across the most rugged of the canyons, and was to be reached only after the most hazardous of rides. The old woman of the hills was an ancient character about whom clung a thousand spookish traditions, but who, in the opinion of John Tuilis, was nothing more than a wise fortune-teller and necromancer who knew every trick in the trade of hoodwinking the superstitious. He had seen her and he had been properly impressed. Somehow, he did not like the thought of taking the Prince to the cabin among the mists and crags.
"They say she eats boys, now and then," he added, as if suddenly remembering it.
"Gee! Do you suppose we could get there some day when she's eating one?"
As they rode back to the Castle after an hour, coming down through Castle Avenue from the monastery road, they passed a tall, bronzed young man whom Tullis at once knew to be an American. He was seated on a big boulder at the roadside, enjoying the shade, and was evidently on his way by foot to the Castle gates to watch the beau monde assembling for the review. At his side was the fussy, well-known figure of Cook's interpreter, eagerly pointing out certain important personages to bun as they passed. Of course, the approach of the Prince was the excuse for considerable agitation and fervour on the part of the man from Cook's. He mounted the boulder and took off his cap to wave it frantically.
"It's the Prince!" he called out to Truxton King. "Stand up! Hurray! Long live the Prince!"
Tullis had already lifted his hand in salute to his countryman, and both had smiled the free, easy smile of men who know each other by instinct.
The man from Cook's came to grief. He slipped from his perch on the rock and came floundering to the ground below, considerably crushed in dignity, but quite intact in other respects.
The spirited pony that the Prince was riding shied and reared in quick affright. The boy dropped his crop and clung valiantly to the reins. A guardsman was at the pony's head in an instant, and there was no possible chance for disaster.
Truxton King unbent his long frame, picked up the riding crop with a deliberateness that astonished the man from Cook's, strode out into the roadway and handed it up to the boy in the saddle.