Chapter Eleven (part c)

He turned back and began to amble along down the road, as if humouring the porcupine for some personal reason of his own. Then all of a sudden he stopped the wagon dead in its tracks and looked back again.

"What is it now?" said the porcupine.

"You aren't going to like it," the horse told him.

"Like what?"

"There's a troll bridge coming up."

The porcupine jumped to his feet. He moaned with dismay when he saw that the road crossed a large stone bridge not far away up ahead.

"No!" cried the porcupine and he began to tremble. His tremble became a shake and the shaking continued to quiver through his body, shivering his quills as it traveled from head to tail and back again. The porcupine opened and closed his mouth a number of times as if gasping for breath. Finally he just waved his paws in the air and then dropped them helplessly to his sides.

"I knew you wouldn't like it," commented the horse.

"What'll we do?" wailed the porcupine.

"Pay the toll," said the horse.

"Pay the toll?" echoed the porcupine.

"The troll toll, pay it!"

"Do we have to pay pennies?" asked the porcupine plaintively. "I have plenty of stones in my sample case. I could use those. A troll'd never know the difference."

"He'd know," said the horse. "Trolls only like to eat pennies ... and porcupines."

"All right, okay," said the porcupine and he reached reluctantly under the seat for his money jar.

"Do we really have to pay the toll?" asked Jamie.

"Of course not," said the horse. "It's a free country ain't it? We got rights, same as the troll. Course if we don't pay the toll the troll eats us."

"He eats us?" said Jennifer.

"If he's hungry," said the horse. "Which he always is unless he just got through eating somebody else."

"That's horrible! "

"Not really," said the horse. "It's all in how you look at it. It ain't that horrible for the troll."

The porcupine sat down again and shook his head.

"This is the last straw," he said. "The outer limits. Trolls! They're the thorn in the paw of humanity! I won't pay a penny more and they can't make me either!"

The porcupine handed the penny jar to Jennifer and took out three stones from his sample case.

"What are you going to do with those?" asked the horse.

"I'm going to use them to pay the toll instead of the pennies," said the porcupine. "Dumb trolls, they're probably not even under that bridge at all."

The horse raised one eyebrow and sniffed the air.

"Smells pretty trolly to me," he observed.

"I don't care what it smells like!" wailed the porcupine. "I'm not throwing away pennies to anybody!"

The horse looked at the porcupine and shook his head.

"You'll be sorry," he said.