The prince leaped from his horse, leaving Pepper on the saddle-bow.
No sooner had he touched the ground than the Dwarf shouted:
“Hi! to him, Billy! to him, Daniel! at him, good lions, at him!” and, with an awful roar, two lions rushed from a neighbouring potato-patch and made for Ricardo. These were not ordinary lions, history avers, each having two heads, each being eight feet high, with four rows of teeth; their skins as hard as nails, and bright red, like morocco. [135]
The prince did not lose his presence of mind; hastily he threw the cake of crocodiles’ eggs, millet-seed, and sugar-candy to the lions. This is a dainty which lions can never resist, and running greedily at it, with four tremendous
snaps, they got hold of each other by their jaws, and their eight rows of teeth were locked fast in a grim and deadly struggle for existence!
The Dwarf took in the affair at a glance.
“Cursed be he who taught you this!” he cried, and then whistled in a shrill and vulgar manner on his very dirty fingers. At his call rushed up an enormous Spanish cat, ready saddled and bridled, and darting fire from its eyes. To leap on its back, while Ricardo sprang on his own steed, was to the active Dwarf the work of a moment. Then clapping spurs to its sides (his spurs grew naturally on his bare heels, horrible to relate, like a cock’s spurs) and taking his cat by the head, the Dwarf forced it to leap on to Ricardo’s saddle. The diamond sword which slew the king of the Golden Mines—that invincible sword which hews iron like a reed—was up and flashing in the air!
At this very moment King Prigio, seeing, in the magic globe, all that passed, and despairing of Ricardo’s life, was just about to wish the dwarf at Jericho, when through the open window, with a tremendous whirr, came a huge vulture, and knocked the king’s wishing cap off! Wishing was now of no use.
This odious fowl was the Fairy of the Desert, the Dwarf’s trusted ally in every sort of mischief. The vulture flew instantly out of the window; and ah! with what awful anxiety the king again turned his eyes on the crystal ball only a parent’s heart can know. Should he see Ricardo bleeding at the feet of the abominable dwarf? The king scarcely dared to look; never before had he known the nature of fear. However, look he did, and saw the dwarf un-catted, and Pepper, the gallant Dandie Dinmont, with his teeth in the throat of the monstrous Spanish cat.
No sooner had he seen the cat leap on his master’s saddle-bow than Pepper, true to the instinct of his race, sprang at its neck, just behind the head—the usual place,—and, with an awful and despairing mew, the cat (Peter was its name) gave up its life.