The Dragon in the Volcano Read Online Free

were a romp in the glade!”
    Leaving the willow muttering to himself, the cousins swatted their way through the curtain of sallow fronds and got away as fast as they could.
    “At least now we’ve got some fresh clues,” Daisy said.
    As they made their way down the path into the Deep Woods, all around them they heard the breeze sifting through the branches of the trees. The trees wished them well and confirmed Willow’s words. “Shhheee did, she did, she did pass this waaay!” they whispered.
    The cousins came to a clearing in the woods and walked to the middle of it, where there was a deep hole with a wide wooden ramp leading to an underground cavern. Two hobgoblins met Jesse and Daisy at the bottom of the ramp, as if they had been expecting them. One held a torch and the other wore the faded purple bandanna Daisy had given him last summer. They stared at the cousins with eyes that were without pupils or irises, red-rimmed and milky white.
    “Hello, Hub. Hey, Hermander,” Jesse said, nolonger intimidated by these fellows. They looked a little scary but he knew they were really very sweet. “We’d like an audience with Her Royal Lowness.”
    The hobgoblins’ heads bobbed, and they made a dark, moist grunting and snuffling sound through their smashed snouts, a
very underground
sound that Jesse knew was typical of hobgoblins. Then Hub and Hermander turned and headed across the cavern, which rose above them like a vast and stately cathedral made of dirt and tree roots and rock. On the far side, seated upon a mossy throne decorated with tiny snail shells and black pearls, was Queen Hap of the Hobgoblin Hive of Hobhorn, Her Royal Lowness herself. Clad in the shimmering brown finery that flattered her dark-red hair and greenish skin, she was whittling a stick with a sharp, gem-studded knife.
    The cousins did what they knew they had to do. They got down on their hands and knees and touched their foreheads to the earth. As they raised their heads, the queen regarded them with regal serenity through moss-green eyes that never blinked.
    “Greetings, Keepers!” she boomed in her deep bullfrog voice.
    “Greetings, Your Royal Lowness,” Daisy said. “We have come because we’ve lost our dragon.Willow told us he sent Emmy down here to play with the hobgoblins. Is she still here, by any chance?”
    The queen shook her head. “Your draggy-wagon isn’t underground with us at present,” she said. “But she was here, a day or two ago. She was lonesome and boredsome and wanted to play a game of horsieshoes, but the iron in the horsieshoes hurt her dragon tally-walons. So we took pity on her and made her a safe game to play. We carved the stake ourselves, and some of our loyal subjects wove her ringlets to toss from the bendy-wendy roots of the willow tree. Last we saw her, she was scampering up the ramping, eager to set up her new gamey-wamey and amuse herself with it.”
    “Thank you, Your Royal Lowness,” the cousins said happily as they climbed to their feet.
    “Be careful and wareful, Keepers,” she said to them, just as they were backing, ever so respectfully, out of her sight.
    The cousins froze.
    “How careful?” Jesse asked.
    “Wareful of what?” Daisy added.
    “We hear rumblings and tumblings here under the ground. If we’re not mistaken—and we rarely are—things may very well be heating up again,” she said, her voice dropping even deeper.
    The cousins nodded uncertainly, thanked the queen, and walked back up the wooden ramp.
    “What in Sam Hill was Her Lowness talking about?” Jesse asked Daisy as they made their way back through the Deep Woods toward the barn.
    “No idea,” said Daisy. “St. George is still stuck in that block of amber, so what could she possibly mean by ‘heating up’?”
    “Not to mention rumblings and tumblings,” Jesse added.
    When they got back to the barn, they walked around it once, very slowly. Sure enough, on the Deep Woods side of the barn, near an old tree stump,