d hung his
helmet on the pommel. Then he picked up his spear and clambered into
the saddle. "We're not beat yet, Easy Money," he said. _Giddy-ap!_

Easy Money whinnied, stamped its feet, and started back toward the
_Yore_. A short while later they passed the lane that led to the
castle of Carbonek. Presently Mallory heard the _clip-clop_ of
approaching hoofbeats, and not wanting to risk an encounter in his
weakened condition, he encephalo-guided the rohorse off the highway
and into the deep shadows of a big oak. There was something
tantalizingly familiar about the horse and rider coming down the
highway. Small wonder: the "horse" was Easy Money and the rider was
himself. He was on his way to the castle of Carbonek to lift the Holy
Grail.

Mallory gazed after his retreating figure disgustedly. "Sucker!" he
said.

IV

Rowena nearly threw a fit when Mallory rode into the rec-hall. "Oh,
fair knight, ye be sorely wounded indeed!" she cried, helping him down
from his rohorse. "Certes, an ye bleed so much ye may die!"

Mallory's head was throbbing, and he saw two damosels that hight
Rowena instead of only one. "I'll be all right after I lie down for a
while," he said. "And don't worry about the bleeding--it's almost
stopped."

He took a step in the direction of his bedroom office, staggered and
would have fallen if she hadn't caught his arm. Her strength
astonished him: for all the lightness of his armor, it still lent him
an over-all weight of some two hundred and ten pounds; and yet the
shoulder which she provided for him to lean on did not give once all
the way to his bedside. She had his pauldrons, breastplate, and
arm-coverings off in no time flat. His cuisses, greaves, and sollerets
followed. The last he remembered was lying there in his under garments
and his chain-mail vest with three faces swimming in the misted sea of
his vision, each of them invested with the peculiar beauty that
concern, and concern alone, can grant.

"How is mammakin's little man now?" the rent-a-mammakin asked,
applying soothing sedasalve to the boy Mallory's swollen ear.

"He hit me, mammakin," the boy Mallory sobbed. "Just because I
wouldn't tell him that 'G' stands for 'Geography'. I hate geography! I
hate it, hate it, hate it!"

"Nasty old rent-a-robogogue! Mammakin sent him away. He was an old
model that got rented out by mistake. Is mammakin's little man's ear
all right now?"

The boy Mallory sat up. "I want my real--" he b