CHAPTER 21 

In the evening, the sky darkened again before sunset. The needlepoint patches of blue became pools of roiling cloud. 

"He who runs abroad from evil, finds evil where he flees," Chester said. 

Dennis laughed and patted the robot's carapace. The cut across his palm still stung, and there seemed to be a little swelling in the hand itself. Despite that, he felt surprisingly good. "But can the wanderer find shelter from the rain, my friend?" he asked. 

Chester rose cautiously onto the tips of his eight tentacles. Even so, the robot's egg-shaped body was no higher than Dennis' shoulders. Chester rotated slowly, moving his limbs in sets of four, a few inches clockwise at a time. 

At last he said, "Here is a tree that became hollow before it fell, Dennis. It will give us shelter from the rain." 

Dennis couldn't imagine how his companion could see a fallen tree or anything else through the leaves and gathering darkness, but he followed Chester willingly into the undergrowth. A few yards away—though each step was a battle—was the bole of a forest giant, just as the robot had said. 

Upright, the tree had been twenty feet across at the base. Now, on its side, more than half that diameter was a cave whose lip was orange and yellow with the shelf fungus eating its way into the wood which remained. 

Chester paused. The first drops of rain rapped against leaves, but the downpour hadn't yet penetrated the triple canopy. 

Dennis climbed in. The interior of the trunk was damp and had a hint of reptilian sharpness. It made him wish that he'd drawn the sword before entering. Chester followed, a barely-visible glimmer in silhouette as the storm thundered down and washed away the last of the daylight. 

The hollow was slimy, and Dennis could hear water running through a knothole somewhere farther back in the trunk; but in comparison at least to the night before, he was dry and comfortable. The tree was real, not a dream like the dead wizard's cabin, and Chester lay beside him with his limbs coiled. 

Dennis laughed. "How is it that heroes spend the nights between one adventure and the next, Chester," he asked. 

"You are a hero, Dennis," the robot said softly. "And it is in a fallen tree that you are spending the night." 

"I'm no hero," the youth murmured. "I know that now." 

But he slept easily, wrapped in the fuzzy warmth of his friend's compliment.