"Well, what did you throw the key away for?" retorted the boy. "If you hadn't done that, I could turn it off."
And there they stood quarreling, and all the time the gold was getting deeper and deeper about them. And when at last they decided they had better go back to the Doodab's palace before they were buried alive, they found it was too late. The gold pieces were so deep they could not walk.
"Mercy me!" groaned Omo. "I'll never get back to my grandfather now. I wish I had never come here!"
"So do I!" snapped the Doodab of Ootch. "Until you came I was perfectly poor and happy, and now I'm horribly rich and wretched. Oh, what shall we do?"
And then all of a sudden Omo remembered a whistle the fairy godmother had given him when she gave him the key. "If you really need me for anything," she had said, "just blow this whistle; but not unless you really need me." So Omo put the whistle to his lips and blew as hard as he could, for he thought if he ever really needed a fairy godmother he needed one now.
And the minute he blew the whistle there was a flutter and a whirr, and the fairy godmother, frilled bonnet and all, stood before them.
"Well," she said, "you are in a nice mess, aren't you?"
"It isn't my fault," said the boy. And then he told her how he had tried to obey her instructions, but could not because the Doodab of Ootch had thrown the key away. "I did make a mistake turning the fountain on," he said, "but I could have turned it off all right if the key had not been taken from me."
"I see!" said the fairy godmother.
Then she told Omo to fill his cap as well as his pockets with gold pieces. And after he had done it, she gave three clucks like a chicken does, snapped her finger twice; and bing—all the gold pieces in the streets of Ootch, all the gold in the Doodab's money bags, all the gold in the pockets and stockings of the Night Watchman; all the gold everywhere except that which Omo had, disappeared, and the Fountain of Riches also.