As soon as her feet touched the ground she ran to the king and seized his arm affectionately, crying aloud in her native tongue:
“Oh, my father, it is a miracle! The white man’s wagon is alive, and more fleet than an arrow.”
“It is not the white man’s wagon,” said Bry, quickly. “It is our wagon—the wagon of kings—and the white man is a slave, whose duty it is to make it go.”
“A slave? Oh, I am sorry!” said Ilalah, with disappointment.
“Why?” asked her father, putting an arm around her.
“Because the white man is beautiful as a spirit, and he is good and kind,” answered the princess.
I glanced at the unconscious Duncan and nearly laughed outright. That the thin-faced, stooping, dreamy-eyed inventor could by any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful was as strange as it was amusing. But the girl was doubtless in earnest, and being so rarely beautiful herself she ought to be a judge.
The king was plainly annoyed at this frank praise of a hated white. He presented his daughter, with much ceremony, to Nux and Bryonia, and she touched their foreheads lightly with her finger-tips, and then her own brow, in token of friendship.
“Will your Majesty take a ride in our magic travelling machine?” asked Bry, with proud condescension.
“Not now,” said the king, drawing back thoughtfully.