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Updated: June 28, 2025
"D'you know," here Tommy interposed, not giving me a chance to answer, "that old whiz-bang devil told Doloria that if she spoke to you, or answered your notes, he'd have you jailed for interfering with a foreign country's accredited agent? Sure, he did! He stuffed her poor little head full of trumped-up international law that hadn't a grain of truth in it to scare her, see?
Calling this to Doloria, I began to bob up at different places along the wall, trying in a frenzy to check them, and for the moment was successful. Then I heard her give a cry, as a bullet split the stock of the rifle she was loading. "Some one's in a tree shooting down at us! Look out!" she called, rolling over to get beneath the nearer wall.
I had had some fair ideas about building a lean-to, but Doloria was in possession of a practical knowledge gathered on camping trips that she and Echochee had made for these, I judged, constituted one of her chief recreations since childhood. She knew how to twist ropes of bark for tying the poles, and how to interlay the palm fronds so they would neither leak nor be lifted by the wind.
Around the walls were built-in book shelves, mantel high, filled with the volumes Doloria had told me of. The piano was there, not an up-right as we had found on the Orchid, but a handsome grand, bearing one of the best names. A violin case lay upon it, while near by was a music stand. Altogether, these living quarters of Efaw Kotee showed a taste I would have expected.
"It occurs to me, Monsieur," Tommy crossed and looked down at them and I saw that Doloria read in his eyes the sadness of one who must remain outside while others pass through to happiness "that you, too, can find your heart's best desire. Jack and our sweet Princess will be leaving for Azuria as soon as passports are procurable.
And thus it was that the second bullet flashed by us before I sufficiently gathered my wits to act, to realize that some returning member of Efaw Kotee's band had stumbled on our little paradise. I caught Doloria and swung her behind me, at the same time drawing my automatic and sending two quick shots, aimed high, toward the scoundrel who was making ready to try his hand again.
Echochee, supremely content to have found Doloria, remained at her side. Four of the attacking party had escaped and might well have returned to their houses. We favored the theory, too, that Efaw Kotee had remained there, expecting his band to capture us; so, if the fugitives were with him, they could by now have prepared a formidable resistance.
They were still too far off to be counted, but I felt that Doloria had been right in saying every man of them. That would mean eight if Jess and the old chief were along, furious devils demanding their revenge, mad to surround us and take their own good time about placing a shot where it would do the work.
"What is that hocus-pocus?" "A no-such-a-thing." "Sacré bleu! I see! Pipes and iron safes and hocus-pocus! But I do not care!" He turned to Doloria and, taking one of her hands, said: "You, mon ami, shall find your heart's best desire. It is I who say it! I, who have the authority!" The way he clung to that authority was really pathetic.
"And now," he moaned, rocking to and fro, "after seventeen years of searching, I have won only to lose!" Truly, I was touched. Tommy turned quickly away and blinked at the horizon. Yet neither of us knew that all of this time Doloria had been standing in the companionway door.
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