et out with the coat to
get it mended. "Who is the oldest woman in the kingdom?" asked one of
them. Kaddel kept the list and had to answer--"It is my grandmother." So
they went to her house. But Kaddel's grandmother was ninety years old
and blind, and besides had lost the use of her hands by paralysis. Of
course she could not mend the coat, so there was nothing to be done but
to put her to death and find the next in age. The law was very strict
and could not be avoided. When they went away with the Old Brown Coat,
Kaddel felt very bitter toward the fat old Shahtah. "If he had only been
lean like me!" he groaned; "or if I were only king," he added to
himself. This he said to himself so often that by the time they had
found an old woman who could mend the coat, Kaddel had made up his mind
to be king. "To be king," said he, "one must needs wear the Old Brown
Coat; to be sure one may die; but the chance is even; and at any rate I
am determined to kill Shahtah for making my grandmother die. The coat
would just fit me."

The first night after the coat was finished and safely locked up in the
cedar chest in the palace of the King of Percan, it was Kaddel's turn to
sit upon the chest to guard it. In the middle of the night when all was
quiet, he opened the chest and very carefully put on the Old Brown Coat;
it was a perfect fit. "Now that I have put it on," said he, "I must
either be king or die." Then he wont silently up to Shahtah's chamber
where the guard let him in without suspicion, for Kaddel was a very
trusty man and chief of the Sixteen Coat-Tails; there he killed the fat
Shahtah and came out again. "Do not disturb the King," he said to the
guard, "he will sleep late." Returning to the chest he took out the coat
again and, doing it up in a bundle, went off with it on horseback long
before morning, for he said to himself, "I will escape with the coat,
then when the family of the King find he has been killed and the Old
Brown Coat taken by me, they will be very angry and try to catch me and
get the coat again, for no one can rule who does not wear the coat. But
the people like me, and after a while I will come back and rule over
them." So he rode night and day for a long while, and though the King's
family sent messengers after him in every direction, they could not find
him.

But Kaddel had forgotten that he who wears the coat may after all not be
king but die. He was in the forest on the banks of a beautiful blue
rive