“It don’t seem real, does it?” I says.
“Does l-l-look like a dream or somethin’,” says Mark.
“I didn’t mean just what we see—the fires and things—but the whole mix-up we’re in. Here we are, four boys from Michigan, way up here in the mountains in a ramshackle hotel by ourselves, when we expected to be staying at a swell summer resort. That don’t seem real, but when you add to it that we’ve got a war on our hands all on account of a mysterious Japanese boy who appears from nowhere, and add to that again that the enemy is a party of Japanese men trying to get that boy—well, it pretty nearly flabbergasts me. It ain’t so, that’s all.”
“It is m-m-mysterious,” says Mark. “I’ve been figgerin’ it over quite a bit.”
“What d’you make of it?”
“Not much. Motu’s the mystery. If we knew what he’s doin’ here, or if we knew who he was, then we could make a guess. Yes,” he says, sort of calculating-like, “it’s who and what Motu is that is the real m-m-mystery.”
“You can bet,” says I, “that he ain’t just a common, every-day boy like you and me.”
“Never heard of anybody b-b-besiegin’ a citadel just to get their hands on either of us, did you?”
“Not yet,” says I.
“Motu’s somebody or somethin’,” says Mark. “He’s mighty secret about it, too. Got a right to be if he wants to. But it sure makes me m-mighty curious.”