the night before in a winter dance. That block of ice was the coldest and hardest ice any man or woman had ever seen. This block is ten degrees colder. Can you chop through it?”
“I can try,” said Jack, “or perhaps die trying. But I can do no more and no less.” And he took the small pickax they had used to help them climb the mountain.
“Will you be finished before breakfast time?” asked Amos, glancing at the sun.
“Of course before breakfast,” said the prince, and fell to chopping. The ice chips flew around him, and he worked up such a sweat that in all the cold he still had to take off his shirt. He worked so hard that in one hour he had laid open the chunk, and there, sticking out, was the broken fragment of mirror. Tired but smiling, the prince lifted it from the ice and handed it to Amos. Then he went to pick up his shirt and coat.
“All right, North Wind,” cried Amos. “Take a look at yourself.”
“Stand so that the sun is in your eyes,” said the North Wind, towering over Amos, “because I do not want anyone else to see before I have.”
So Amos and Jack stood with the sun in their eyes, and the great blustering North Wind squatted down to look at herself in the mirror. She must have been pleased with what she saw, because she gave a long, loud laugh that nearly blew them from the peak. Then she leapt a mile into the air, turned over three times, then swooped down upon them, grabbing them up and setting them on her shoulders. Amos and Jack clung to her long, thick hair as the Wind began to fly down the mountain. The Wind cried out in a windy voice: “Now I shall tell all the leaves and whisper to all the waves who I am and what I look like, so they can chatter about it among themselves in autumn and rise and doff their caps to me before a winter storm.” The North Wind was happier than she had ever been since the wizard first made her cave.
It gets light on the top of a mountain well before it does at the foot, and this mountain was so high that when they reached the bottom the sun was nowhere in sight, and they had a good half hour until breakfast time.
“You run and get back in your cell,” said Amos, “and when I have given you enough time, I shall return and eat my eggs and sausages.”
So the prince ran down the rocks to the shore and snuck onto the ship, and Amos waited for the sun to come up. When it did, he started back.
SIX
But, at the boat, all had not gone according to Amos’s plan during the night. The grey man, still puzzling over Amos’s wet clothes—and at last he began to inquire whom Amos had solicited from the sailors to go with him—had gone to the brig himself.
In the brig he saw immediately that there was no jailer and then that there was no prisoner. Furious, he rushed into the cell and began to tear apart the bundle of blankets in the corner. And out of the blankets rolled the jailer, bound and gagged and dressed in the colorful costume of the Prince of the Far Rainbow. For it was the jailer’s clothes that Jack had worn when he had gone with Amos to the mountain.
When the gag came off, the story came out, and the part of the story the jailer had slept through, the grey man could guess for himself. So he untied the jailer and called the sailors and made plans for Amos’s and the prince’s return. The last thing the grey man did was take the beautiful costume back to his cabin where the black trunk was waiting.
When Amos came up to the ship with the mirror under his arm, he called, “Here’s your mirror. Where are my eggs and sausages?”
“Sizzling hot and waiting,” said the grey man, lifting his sunglasses. “Where is the sailor you took to help you?”
“Alas,” said Amos, “he was blown away in the wind.” He climbed up the ladder and handed the grey man the mirror. “Now we only have a third to go, if I remember right. When do I start looking for that?”
“This afternoon when the sun is its highest and hottest,” said the grey man.
“Don’t I get a chance to rest?” asked