The Dragon and the George Read Online Free PDF

of his lungs, and a shout at the top of a dragon's lungs was something to hear—provided you had earplugs and were safely over the horizon.
    Even that oversize assembly in the cave was shaken. As for Angie, she was either blasted flat on her back or fainted.
    Gorbash's grand-uncle was the first to recover from the shock.
    "Blast it, boy!" he bellowed, in what Jim now unhappily realized were normal dragon conversational tones, "you don't have to burst our eardrums! What do you mean—'hanchee'?"
    Jim had been thinking fast.
    "I sneezed," he said.
    A dead silence greeted this remark. Finally Bryagh retorted.
    "Who ever heard of a dragon sneezing?"
    "Who? Who?" snorted Smrgol. "I heard of a dragon sneezing. Before your time, of course. Old Malgu, my mother's sister's third cousin, once removed, sneezed twice on one day a hundred and eighty-three years ago. Don't tell me you never heard of a dragon sneezing. Sneezing runs in our family. It's a sign of brains."
    "That's right," put in Jim hastily. "A sign my brains are working. Busy brains make your nose itch."
    "You tell 'em, boy!" Smrgol rumbled, in the second dubious silence following this remark.
    "I'll bet!" roared Bryagh. He turned to the rest of the assembly. "You all know Gorbash. Mooning around aboveground half the time, making friends with hedgehogs and wolves and what all! Smrgol here's been talking up his grand-nephew for years, but Gorbash's never showed anything yet that I know of—least of all, brains! Shut up, Gorbash!"
    "Why should I?" Jim shouted, hastily. "I've got as good a right to talk as anyone else here. About this—uh—george, here—"
    "Kill it!"
    "Burn it alive!"
    "Hold a raffle, and the winning diamond gets to eat it," a roar of suggestions interrupted him.
    "No!" he thundered. "Listen to me—"
    "No, is right," trumpeted Bryagh. " I found this george. If anybody gets to eat it, it'll be me." He glared around the cave. "But I got a better use for this george. I say, let's stake it out where the other georges can see it. Then, when some of them come to get it back, we'll jump them when they aren't expecting it and grab the lot of them. Then we'll sell them all back to the rest of the georges for a lot of gold."
    When Bryagh said the word "gold," Jim saw all the dragon eyes around him light up and glitter; and he also felt a hot bite of avarice warming his own veins. The thought of gold rang in his head like the thought of a fountain of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert. Gold… A slow, swelling murmur of approval, like the surf of a distant sea storm, rose up in the cave.
    Jim fought down the gold hunger in his own dragon-breast, and felt panic rising in its stead. Somehow he had to turn them all from this plan of Bryagh's. For a moment he toyed with the wild idea of snatching up Angie, cage and all, and making a run for it. Even as he thought this, it came to him that it was not such a wild idea after all. Until he was able to see Angie close to Bryagh—and Bryagh was about his own size—he had not realized how big he was. Even squatting on his haunches, as he was not, his head was in the neighborhood of nine feet off the floor of the cave. Standing upright on all four feet, he would probably measure six feet or better at a front shoulder, with as much as half that length again of powerful, limber tail. If he could catch the other dragons all looking the other way for a moment…
    But then it sank in on him that he did not know the way out of this underground place. He had to assume that a further opening dimly seen at the cave's far end led to a passage which would take him to the surface. Some faint, Gorbash-memory seemed to assure him this was so. But he could not count on the subconscious memories of this body he was inhabiting. If he should lose his way—be trapped with his back against some wall, or in some blind passage—the other dragons might well tear him apart; and Angie, even if she