Prickles waited the one-fifth part of an instant, to listen and locate.  Then he got going, and provided 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, like a clockwork toy still, that couldn’t stop.  Only he did stop, against the biggest rat of all, ducking his head, and jerking forward his shoulder-muscles, and spines, with a sort of a thrust over his head, and a noise like a pair of expiring bellows; and the prickles hit home.