The Wishing Horse of Oz

by Ruth Plumly Thompson

"Who's there?" he demanded in a dignified voice.

"'Tis I-Iva the Kitchen Boy!" stuttered a frightened treble. "I must see the Emperor at once."

"Well, shall we let him in?" Bitty Bit looked uneasily at Pigasus and Dorothy and then rather thoughtfully at Chalk.

"Suit yourselves," yawned the white horse indifferently. "It's probably a messenger telling us the pudding is cold with all this delay and darkness. You asked for an hour's time and conversation and we agreed to that demand, so it is for you to decide what to do, not us."

"Oh, let him in," fumed Pigasus, "and tell him to stop this hammering and yammering. What harm is there in a Kitchen Boy?"

So Bitty Bit, taking the key from the lock and squinting through the keyhole to assure himself there was only a small boy outside, quickly admitted him. Now in darted Iva, screaming loudly of a mad man in the cellar and bursting into tearful and incoherent recital of his woes. Scarcely had he got out two sentences before Skamperoo fell bodily off his horse and made a desperate snatch at the Kitchen Boy's throat. But Bitty Bit was too quick for him. His eyes, too, had caught the glimmer of emeralds, and jerking the three chains from the lad's neck as Chalk made a savage lunge forward, he tossed them to Pigasus. Catching them on his nose as cleverly as a trained seal, the pink pig spread his wings and flew up to the top of a tall cabinet, where he sat panting and puffing with satisfaction and defiance.

"Come down, you fat scoundrel!" roared Skamperoo, dancing up and down like a dervish, while the poor Kitchen Boy, outraged by the way both Skamperoo and Bitty Bit had rushed upon him, burst into loud sobs and rushing out the still open door, ran crying down the corridor. Slamming the door and locking it after him, Bitty Bit rather anxiously waited for Chalk's next move, and as usual Chalk was quite prepared and ready to make it.

"Well," he observed with a jaunty flick of his tail, "now that you have the famous wishing emeralds, I suppose you are satisfied and we may as well go. Come along, Skamperoo, you will get nowhere in an argument with a pig. Just casting pearls before swine, you know, and he already has our emeralds!"

"You mean your wishing necklaces!" shrieked Pigasus furiously, "and I'll tell you what I wish. I wish that you and your silly Master were clams at the bottom of the Nonestic Ocean!" Thoroughly shocked and startled by the pink pig's unexpected wish, Bitty Bit and Dorothy rushed toward the cabinet, hoping in some way to prevent the wish from taking effect. But they need not have worried, for of course, nothing happened at all. Then Skamperoo, urged by Chalk, hastily climbed into the saddle.