"No! No!" it screamed. "Not two! Just one! Quixote doesn't count!"
The Devil gave a jerk and hauled me up the bank in a single motion and set me on my feet.
A lantern was set upon the ground and by its light I could see that the Devil was a chunky character, a bit shorter than I was, but built most powerfully and running to a lot of fat. He wore no clothes except a dirty loincloth tied about his middle and his overgrown paunch hung across it in a fold.
The Referee kept on with his squeaky squawling. "It is not fair," he shouted. "You know it is not fair. That Quixote is a fool. He never does things right. The beating of Don Quixote is no facing of a danger and…"
The Devil turned and swung his foot, the cloven hoof flashing in the lantern light. The kick caught the Referee somewhere in his middle and hoisted him and sent him sailing out of sight. His squawling trailed off into a reedy sound and ended in a splash.
"There now," said the Devil, turning back to me, "that will give us a moment of honest peace and quiet, although he is a most persistent pest and will be crawling out to pester us again. It doesn't seem to me," he said, switching quickly to another subject, "that you appear too frightened."
"I'm petrified," I said.
"It is something of a problem," the Devil complained, switching his barbed tail back and forth to show his puzzlement, "to know just how one should appear when he confronts a mortal. When you humans persist in portraying me in so many different guises, one can never know which of them is the most effective. As a matter of fact, I can assume any one of the many forms which are attributed to me if you have a preference. Although I must confess that the one in which you see me now is, by all odds, the most comfortable to carry."
"I have no preference," I said. "Continue in your comfort." I was getting back some courage, but I still was shaky. It's not every day one converses with the Devil.
"You mean, perhaps," he said, "that you've not spent much thought on me."
"I guess that's it," I said.
"That is what I thought," he answered, dolefully. "That has been the story of my life in the last half-century or so. People almost never think of me and when they do they aren't scared of me. Oh, a bit uncomfortable, perhaps, but not really scared. And that is hard to take. Once upon a time, not too long ago, the entire Christian world was plenty scared of me."
"There may be some who still are," I told him, trying to comfort him. "In some of the backward countries, they must still be scared of you." And as soon as I'd said it, I was sorry that I had, for I could see that it was no comfort to him, but only made him feel the worse.
The Referee came clambering up the bank. He was covered with mud and his thatch of hair was dripping, but when he reached the top, he went into a wild war dance of rage. "I will not have it," he shouted at the Devil. "I don't care what you say. He still has two to go. You cannot deny the werewolves, but you must deny Quixote, who is no fit antagonist. I tell you the Rule will go for nothing if…"
The Devil sighed in resignation and reached — to grip my arm. "Leave us go," he said, "to some place where we can sit and talk."
There was a mighty swish and a peal of sudden thunder and a smell of sulphur in the air and, in the space of one short breath, we were otherwhere, upon a rise of cleared ground that rose above a swale. We were standing near a clump of trees and beside the trees lay a heap of tumbled boulders. From the swale below us came the peaceful croaking of happy, springtime frogs and a little breeze was rustling the trees. All in all, it was a much more inviting place than the bank beside the swamp.
My knees were buckling under me, but the Devil held me up and led me to the boulders and there he sat me down upon one of the boulders that proved very comfortable. Then he sat down beside me, crossed one leg over the other and curled his spiked tail around until the end of it rested in his lap.
"Now," he said, "we can converse without undue disturbance. The Referee may hunt us out, of course, but it will take some time. I pride myself, beyond all others, upon my mastery of the art of going elsewhere very rapidly."
"Before we settle down to any lengthy conversation," I told him, "there are some questions that I want to ask. There was a woman with me and she has disappeared. She was at the inn and…"
"I know all that," he told me, with a leer. "Name of Kathy Adams. You can rest easy concerning her, for she has been returned to Earth—the human Earth, that is. Which is just as well, for we didn't want her. But we had to4ake her, because she was with you."
"Didn't want her?"
"No, of course not," the Devil said. "You were the one we wanted."
"Now, look here…" I started to say, but he cut me off with an airy wave of a massive hand.
"We need you as a negotiator. I suppose that's the way to say it. We've been looking for someone who could do a job for us, you might say be our agent, and then you came along and…"
"If that was what you wanted," I told him, "you went about it in a ham-handed sort of way. Your gang did their best to kill me and it was only by good luck…"
He interrupted me with a chuckle. "Not good luck," he said. "A well-honed sense of self-preservation that worked far better than anything I've seen for years. And about this business' of trying to do you in—I can promise you that there are certain expediters here who have smarted for it. They have one-track minds and too much imagination and there'll be some changes made. I was busy with too many other things, as you can well imagine, and did not hear, at first, of what was going on."
"You mean that this rule of three times is a charm.."
He shook his head sadly. "No, I regret to tell you there is nothing I can do to change that. A rule's a rule, you know. And, after all, it was you humans who made up the rule along with a bunch of others that made no sort of sense. Like 'Crime does not pay, when you know damn well it does, and all that foolishness about early to bed and early to rise." He shook his head again. "You can't begin to imagine the kinds of trouble those fool rules of yours are always giving us."
"But they aren't rules," I said.
"I know. You call them adages. But once you get enough people to believe there is something in them, then we are stuck with them."
"So you are still going to have one more go at me. Unless you agree with the Referee that this Quixote business…"
"The Quixote business stands," he growled. "I agree with the Referee that this crack-brained character out of Spain is not difficult for anyone above the age of five to handle. But I want you out of this and the quicker and the easier I can get you out of it, the better it will be. There's business to be done. What I can't understand is what misplaced sense of chivalry made you agree to take on another round. Once you polished off the serpent, you were in the clear, but then you let that slimy Referee talk you into…"
"I owed Kathy something," I told him. "I got her into it."
"I know," he said. "I know. There are times I can't get you humans figured out. Most of the time you go around slitting one another's throats and sticking knives into your fellow humans' backs and climbing over them to achieve what you call success, then you turn around and get so damn noble and compassionate it's enough to make one sick."
"But why, in the first place, if you have some use for me, and I really can't believe you have—but if you do, why try to kill me? Why not just reach down, if that is how you do it, and simply pick me up?"