“Not much; but if you say Dorothea to them, they’ll make your next course clear, even if they have to send a guide with you.”
“Good. I think I’ve got it all pretty straight. All right. I’m ready. We’ll start, then. Oh, but wait one minute. I must get something out of my trunk.”
Some hours before, when he had returned from Carlotta, he had pressed her spray of hermosita between two sheets of the hotel blotting-paper, which he had then laid away in the trunk. He now opened this precious packet, broke off a leaf from the spray, and placed it in his pocket-book; the rest he put back into the trunk. He then wrote a few words to the hotel proprietor.
“I’m ready now,” he said. “I’ll leave this note to say that I’m coming back, and want my room kept.”
“Oh, Hi,” she said, “I’ve brought no money.”
“I have got money enough,” Hi said, “but I have not got a revolver. Father wouldn’t let me take one. I knew he knew nothing about it. Now we had better have a story in case we’re stopped. We had better say that your mother wanted me and that you had come to fetch me. They couldn’t object to that. Where is your market basket? In the cellar?”
“No, in the hall.”
“We had better go out by the hall,” he said. “And I had better take no baggage. Then they would ask no questions. If I were caught going out with a bag, they would think I was shooting the moon. I have got some handkerchiefs. That’s enough.”
“What will they think of my market basket?” she said. “They will think I have come to steal the linen.”
“Leave it here,” Hi said.