The Dragon and the George Read Online Free PDF Page B

survived that battle, would lose her only possible rescuer. There had to be another way.
    "Wait a minute," he called out. "Hold on!"
    "Shut up, Gorbash!" thundered Bryagh.
    "Shut up, yourself!" Jim bellowed back. "I told you my brains were busy. They just came up with the best idea yet."
    Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Angie sitting up in her cage with a dazed expression, and felt relief. The sight gave him courage and he doubled the volume of his voice.
    "This is a female george you've got here. Maybe that didn't strike any of you as something important; but I've been aboveground often enough to learn a thing or two. Sometimes female georges are especially valuable—"
    At Jim's shoulder, Smrgol cleared his throat with a sound like an airhammer biting into particularly stubborn concrete.
    "Absolutely correct!" he boomed. "It might even be a princess we've got. Looks to me something like a princess. Now, a lot of you nowadays don't know what princesses are; but in the old days many a dragon found a whole pack of georges after him because the george he picked up turned out to be a princess. When I fought the ogre of Gormely Keep, he had a princess locked up along with his pack of other female georges. And you ought to have seen the georges when they got that princess back. Now, if we stake this one out, they might send a regular army against us to try and get it back… No, staking it out's too risky. Might as well just cut our losses and eat—"
    "On the other hand," shouted Jim, quickly, "if we treat her well and hold her—'it,' I mean—for a hostage, then we can make the georges do anything we want—"
    " No !" roared Bryagh. "It's my george. I won't stand for—"
    "By my tail and wings!" The tremendous lung power of Smrgol cut the other dragon off. "Are we a community, or a tribe of mere-dragons? If this george is actually a princess and can be used to stop these shelled georges from hunting us all over the landscape, then it's a community property. Oh yes, I see some of you with the gold-lust still in your eyes; but just stop and think that the life-lust is maybe something just a little bit more important. How many of you here would like to face just a single george in his shell, with his horn aimed at you? Eh? We've had enough of this nonsense. The boy here's got a real idea—surprised I didn't think of it myself. But then my nose wasn't itching; his was. I vote we hold the george here hostage until young Gorbash can go find out what it's worth to the other ones. How about it?"
    Slowly at first, and then with mounting enthusiasms, the dragon community voted to do as Smrgol had suggested. Bryagh completely lost his temper, swore for forty straight seconds at near full dragon-volume, and stamped out of the meeting. Seeing the excitement was over, other members of the community began to drift off.
    "Come, my boy," Smrgol puffed, leading the way to the cage, and covering it once more with the tapestry. "Pick up the whole thing, there. Careful! Not too quickly. You don't want to shake the george around too much. Now, follow me. We'll take it up to one of the topside caves opening on the cliff face. Georges can't fly, so it'll be safe enough there. We can even let it out of the cage and it'll get some light and air. Georges need that."
    Jim, carrying the cage, followed the older dragon up a number of winding passages until they came out into a small cave with a narrow—by dragon standards—opening on thin air. Jim set the cage down, Smrgol rolled a boulder into place to block the entrance by which they had come, and Jim stepped to the edge of the outer opening to look around at the countryside. He caught his breath at the sight: one-hundred-plus feet of sheer cliffside drop to the jagged rocks below.
    "Well, Gorbash," said Smrgol, coming up beside him and draping a friendly tail over the younger dragon's armor-plated shoulders. "You've talked yourself into a job. Now, my boy, I don't