d one astonishment. Till then he had
seemed slow as the times he had descended from--like a rhinoceros.
But, like a rhino, he proved that he could shift some when hustled. He
did. It looked like suddenly releasing a clockwork toy wound up to
breaking-point. His short legs gave this impression, and his
next-to-no-neck, giving him a look of rigidity, assisted it. He did
not run so much as rush, and his spines and bristles, coming low on
either side in an overhang, so to speak, like an armored car, made him
rustle and scuffle tremendously. Three rabbits doing the same act, or
five cats, could scarce have made more row than he did.

It was not, however, so much the fact that Prickles had gone that was
so noticeable as the fact that he had _arrived_. His arrival seemed to
follow his going as one slide follows another on a screen. One would
never have believed such quickness of him; nor, as a matter of fact, do
I think he would have believed it of himself; but--well, love is a
mighty power, and makes folks do some strange things.

What he found was two ditch-banks, pock-marked with the untidy dug-outs
of the rat-people, smelling ratty, and looking worse, one original ray
of moonlight lighting the beaten ditch between. In the moonlight one
young female hedgehog, who may have been pretty by hedgehog standards,
but was now pretty by none, and five rats, frankly beastly, very busy
indeed with that same hedgehog. They must have caught that young lady
of the spikes "napping"--a rare thing. Yet, allowing for the fact that
she was in love--with love and nothing else, so far--and careless, or
allowing that she may have mistaken the unclean ones momentarily, she
may have given them one brief half-instant. And it doesn't do to give
a rat even the half of a half-instant. If you do, he has got you, or
you haven't got him.

Apparently they had pretty well got her before she could quite roll up,
and in a half-rolled-up condition she was doing her best to meet the
jabs of five pairs of gnawing, cold-chisel, incisor, yellow-rats' teeth
at once. To time, apparently, she had not been successful in the
attempt--you could see the dark stains of blood glisten in the
moonlight, and the end was certain, on the face of it.

Prickles, however, was a new factor that had got to short-circuit that
end, and Prickles didn't wait to meditate prehistorically _that_ time.
He came. He came full tilt into the midst of the melee like--well,
li