I had a new trade now,and plenty of business in it.The king was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live in them.From that time out,I prophesied myself bald-headed trying to supply the demand.I have done some indiscreet things in my day,but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the worst.Still,it had its ameliorations.A prophet doesn't have to have any brains.They are good to have,of course,for the ordinary exigencies of life,but they are no use in professional work.
It is the restfulest vocation there is.When the spirit of prophecy comes upon you,you merely cake your intellect and lay it off in a cool place for a rest,and unship your jaw and leave it alone;it will work itself:
the result is prophecy.
Every day a knight-errant or so came along,and the sight of them fired the king's martial spirit every time.He would have forgotten himself,sure,and said something to them in a style a suspicious shade or so above his ostensible degree,and so I always got him well out of the road in time.Then he would stand and look with all his eyes;and a proud light would flash from them,and his nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's,and I knew he was longing for a brush with them.But about noon of the third day I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days before;a precaution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken,I was so loath to institute it;but now I had just had a fresh reminder:while striding heedlessly along,with jaw spread and intellect at rest,for I was prophesying,I stubbed my toe and fell sprawling.I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment;then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack.
I had that dynamite bomb in it,done up in wool in a box.It was a good thing to have along;the time would come when I could do a valuable miracle with it,maybe,but it was a nervous thing to have about me,and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it.Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get along with its society.I got it out and slipped it into my scrip,and just then here came a couple of knights.The king stood,stately as a statue,gazing toward them --had forgotten himself again,of course --and before I could get a word of warning out,it was time for him to skip,and well that he did it,too.He supposed they would turn aside.Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt under foot?When had he ever turned aside himself --or ever had the chance to do it,if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight in time to judiciously save him the trouble?The knights paid no attention to the king at all;it was his place to look out himself,and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly ridden down,and laughed at besides.
The king was in a flaming fury,and launched out his challenge and epithets with a most royal vigor.The knights were some little distance by now.
They halted,greatly surprised,and turned in their saddles and looked back,as if wondering if it might be worth while to bother with such scum as we.Then they wheeled and started for us.Not a moment must be lost.
I started for THEM.I passed them at a rattling gait,and as I went by I flung out a hair-lifting soulscorching thirteen-jointed insult which made the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison.I got it out of the nineteenth century where they know how.They had such headway that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;then,frantic with rage,they stood up their horses on their hind hoofs and whirled them around,and the next moment here they came,breast to breast.I was seventy yards off,then,and scrambling up a great bowlder at the roadside.When they were within thirty yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level,depressed their mailed heads,and so,with their horse-hair plumes streaming straight out behind,most gallant to see,this lightning express came tearing for me!When they were within fifteen yards,I sent that bomb with a sure aim,and it struck the ground just under the horses'noses.
Yes,it was a neat thing,very neat and pretty to see.It resembled a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi;and during the next fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh.I say we,for the king joined the audience,of course,as soon as he had got his breath again.There was a hole there which would afford steady work for all the people in that region for some years to come --in trying to explain it,I mean;as for filling it up,that service would be comparatively prompt,and would fall to the lot of a select few --peasants of that seignory;and they wouldn't get anything for it,either.
But I explained it to the king myself.I said it was done with a dynamite bomb,This information did him no damage,because it left him as intelligent as he was before.However,it was a noble miracle,in his eyes,and was another settler for Merlin.I thought it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions were just right.Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we had a good subject,and that would be inconvenient,because I hadn't any more bombs along.
