But that didn't mean he was going to keep the jackpot. Not by a long shot. Mallory encephalopathed Easy Money to his side and pulled himself to his feet with the help of the left stirrup and hung his helmet on the pommel. Then he picked up his spear and clambered into the saddle. "We're not beat yet, Easy Money," he said. Giddy-ap!
Easy Money whinnied, stamped its feet, and started back toward the Yore. A short while later they passed the lane that led to the castle of Carbonek. Presently Mallory heard the clip-clop of approaching hoofbeats, and not wanting to risk an encounter in his weakened condition, he encephalo-guided the rohorse off the highway and into the deep shadows of a big oak. There was something tantalizingly familiar about the horse and rider coming down the highway. Small wonder: the "horse" was Easy Money and the rider was himself. He was on his way to the castle of Carbonek to lift the Holy Grail.
Mallory gazed after his retreating figure disgustedly. "Sucker!" he said.
IV
Rowena nearly threw a fit when Mallory rode into the rec-hall. "Oh, fair knight, ye be sorely wounded indeed!" she cried, helping him down from his rohorse. "Certes, an ye bleed so much ye may die!"
Mallory's head was throbbing, and he saw two damosels that hight Rowena instead of only one. "I'll be all right after I lie down for a while," he said. "And don't worry about the bleeding—it's almost stopped."
He took a step in the direction of his bedroom office, staggered and would have fallen if she hadn't caught his arm. Her strength astonished him: for all the lightness of his armor, it still lent him an over-all weight of some two hundred and ten pounds; and yet the shoulder which she provided for him to lean on did not give once all the way to his bedside. She had his pauldrons, breastplate, and arm-coverings off in no time flat. His cuisses, greaves, and sollerets followed. The last he remembered was lying there in his under garments and his chain-mail vest with three faces swimming in the misted sea of his vision, each of them invested with the peculiar beauty that concern, and concern alone, can grant.
"How is mammakin's little man now?" the rent-a-mammakin asked, applying soothing sedasalve to the boy Mallory's swollen ear.
"He hit me, mammakin," the boy Mallory sobbed. "Just because I wouldn't tell him that 'G' stands for 'Geography'. I hate geography! I hate it, hate it, hate it!"
"Nasty old rent-a-robogogue! Mammakin sent him away. He was an old model that got rented out by mistake. Is mammakin's little man's ear all right now?"