Gasping for breath, with all speed Don Quixote got from his wallet a bottle filled with a mixture he had made, a mixture which he firmly believed to be a certain cure for all wounds. Of this he took a long gulp, but just at that moment another big stone hit him such a rap on the mouth that the bottle was smashed into a thousand pieces, and half of his teeth were knocked out.
Down dropped the Knight on the ground, and the shepherds thinking that he was killed, ran away, taking with them seven dead sheep which he had slain.
Sancho Panza found his master in a very bad way, with nearly all the teeth gone from one side of his mouth, and with a terrible pain under his ribs.
"Ah! master," he said, "I told you they were sheep. Why would not you listen to me?"
"Sheep! Sancho. No, no! There is nothing so easy for a wizard like Freston as to change things from one shape to the other. I will wager if you now mount your ass and ride over the hill after them, you will find no sheep there, but the knights and squires come back to their own shape, and the armies marching as when we first saw them."
Now, after this and many other adventures (about which, perhaps, you may some day read for yourself), Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode away into the mountains, for the Knight was sorely in need of a quiet place in which to rest.
So weary were he and his squire, that one night, when they had ridden into a wood, and it chanced that the horse and the ass stood still, both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza fell sound asleep without even getting out of their saddles. There sat the Knight, leaning on his lance; and Sancho, doubled over the pommel, snored as loud as if he had been in a four-post feather bed.
It happened that a wandering thief saw them as he passed.
"Now," thought he, "I want something to ride upon, for I'm tired of walking in these abominable mountains. Here's a chance of a good ass. But how am I to get it, without waking its master?"