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As he leaned his back against a tree he looked up and saw a Bluefinch fly down from the sky and alight upon a branch just before him. The bird looked and looked at him. First it looked with one bright eye and then turned its head and looked at him with the other eye. "Oho! so you've eaten the enchanted peach, have you?" "Was it enchanted?" asked Button-Bright. "Of course," replied the Bluefinch.
"Yes," replied the shaggy man; "we are only obliged to hear this music a short time, until we leave him and go away; but the poor fellow must listen to himself as long as he lives, and that is enough to drive him crazy. Don't you think so?" "Don't know," said Button-Bright. Toto said, "Bow-wow!" and the others laughed. "Perhaps that's why he lives all alone," suggested Dorothy.
Some of the choicest fruit was gathered by the Patchwork Girl from the very highest limbs and tossed down to the others. Suddenly Trot asked: "Where's Button-Bright?" and when the others looked for him they found the boy had disappeared. "Dear me!" cried Dorothy. "I guess he's lost again, and that will mean our waiting here until we can find him."
"And the Pinkies are anxious to get home," added Rosalie, who was present. So Cap'n Bill unhooked the seats from the handle of the umbrella and wound the ropes around the two boards and made a package of them, which he carried under his arm. Trot took the empty lunch basket, and Button-Bright held fast to the precious umbrella.
"Yes," said Button-Bright; "there's a well in our back yard." "You don't understand," cried Dorothy. "I mean, have you ever been on a big ship floating on a big ocean?" "Don't know," said he. "Then why do you wear sailor clothes?" "Don't know," he answered, again. Dorothy was in despair. "You're just AWFUL stupid, Button-Bright," she said. "Am I?" he asked. "Yes, you are."
"Floods and gushes fill our path This is not my day for a bath! Shut if off, or fear my wrath." "We can't," laughed Trot. "We'll jus' have to stick it out till we get to the other side." "Had we better go to the other side?" asked Button-Bright anxiously. "Why not?" returned Cap'n Bill. "The other side's the only safe side for us." "We don't know that, sir," said the boy.
And then, before the boy could ask any more questions, the bird flew away and left him alone. Button-Bright was not much worried to find that the peach he had eaten was enchanted. It certainly had tasted very good, and his stomach didn't ache a bit. So again he began to reflect upon the best way to rejoin his friends.
"That would account for it." "Well, I've noticed that people can speak, even when they've been made invisible," said the Wizard. And then he looked all around him and said in a solemn voice, "Ozma, are you here?" There was no reply. Dorothy asked the question, too, and so did Button-Bright and Trot and Betsy, but none received any reply at all.
Otherwise they were unhurt by the adventure; so the shaggy man stood up and pulled Button-Bright out of the hole and went to the edge of the desert to look at the sand-boat. It was a mere mass of splinters now, crushed out of shape against the rocks. The wind had torn away the sail and carried it to the top of a tall tree, where the fragments of it fluttered like a white flag.
Dorothy had met and questioned the Scarecrow, Tik-Tok, the Shaggy Man, Button-Bright, Cap'n Bill, and even the wise and powerful Wizard of Oz, but not one of them had seen Ozma since she parted with her friends the evening before and had gone to her own rooms. "She didn't say anything las' night about going anywhere," observed little Trot. "No, and that's the strange part of it," replied Dorothy.
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