“Oh, Monsieur, stay! stay!” she cried in a plaintive voice.
It was then I noticed the wild, strange stare of her eyes. I gave Tapee an interrogative glance. He touched his brow significantly. I did not quite comprehend his meaning at the time, but subsequent events soon enlightened me as to the state of Fae Fae’s mind. Promising Tapee and the girl that I would return soon, I hastened from their presence and went back to O’Hara. He was awake and in great pain when I arrived at our diggings. I sat with him till dusk, and all through the night poured cold water on his sprained ankle.
I well knew that while he was lame we had little chance of clearing away, if the gendarmes heard of our whereabouts.
Once again, at O’Hara’s request, I went off to see how Fae Fae was. Arriving at Tapee’s bungalow I found him trembling and muttering in a strange way.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Oh, Masser, she gone! She run away in night; she go kill herself, I sure!”
After the old fellow had rambled on a good deal, I gathered that he had awakened at daybreak, and, discovering that Fae Fae had flown, had spent the morning in searching likely places where she might have hidden herself. I at once got Tapee to send a trusted native friend up to the palace to find out if Fae Fae had returned home. After a while the native came back full of excitement, and informed us that the Queen and her retinue of chiefs had gone off to the French Presidency to inform the officials that Princess Fae Fae had been abducted from the palace by two white men. That bit of information seemed to waken me up. I left Tapee at once.
“It’s no good using language like that,” I said, chidingly to O’Hara, as I rubbed his ankle with coco-nut oil.
By the next day he could just manage to limp along. He was determined to search for Fae Fae, though I had tried to persuade him to do otherwise. That same day he seemed very depressed as he sat under the palms singing to me. (He always sang when he was feeling melancholy.)
“She’ll do herself some injury,” he said.