"Listen, my dear," he said. "You are welcome in my fields any time you wish to be here. You are welcome to take any milkweed you want or to help yourself to any of my other crops. I have asked my wartfrogs to ignore you. You no longer need to feel like an intruder."
"You are very kind," she replied. "You know that I am not from around here. I am not understood amongst my own kind, so I am something of an outcast, you might say."
"Not here, you're not."
"Thank you, sir!" The unicorn seemed to be near tears. "Thank you so much!"
When Jeanne-Marie returned to the little clearing where she had left Graham, she brought him several milkweed pods, as well as a few cookies she had picked from the bushes around the base of MacDonald's rock. "He is very sweet," she said. "The moment I saw his eyes, I knew that he was special. Graham, do you believe in love at first sight?"
"I don't know," he said to her. "But I sure do love these cookies!"
And so it went for the next day and the next. By day, Jeanne-Marie went to the fields, where she grew more and more fond of the odd stallion there. By night, she plotted with Graham as to how they might go about locating Telly. The problem seemed to be that the Witch could have magically zapped him off as far away as Santa Monica, California, had she wanted to do so. Finding him would not be an easy task. To make matters worse, poor Jeanne-Marie had become a tad too taken with MacDonald Lindsay. The wartfrogs had begun to mistrust her.
[Illustration]
"She isn't even the same kind of animal!" said Lambert, the wartfrog leader. "She doesn't have any troll features—not even a little around the eyes! They are totally incompatible! She must only be out to get his milkweed! To think that I once felt sympathy for that wretched little unicorn! Why, that cunning little crook even has Lindsay entranced so much that he has begun giving her some of the good stuff! She is no longer contented with the scraps and rejects of our fields! She has got to go. But how shall we do it? It will have to be handled in a sneaky enough way so as to keep Lindsay from noticing. He has been placed under the spell of that little siren, and I know that he would never grant us permission to shove her away from the area."
It was the very next day that the wartfrogs made their move. Under the direction of Lambert, they went about their work, and it was business as usual. Then, when one of the amphibious pigs saw the small unicorn in the field behind them, Lambert called for a halt. The wartfrogs turned around and went back toward Jeanne-Marie. She was not looking in their direction, so she did not notice that they were coming toward her until it was too late to escape. They were already upon her and hurled her unceremoniously into a harvesting-bag. This they tossed onto their cart and carried away. "I will sell her to a zoo in some other land, where they are not so kind to thieving horse-creatures!" giggled Lambert, showing his teeth. "Now we can get rid of this little troublemaker once and for all! Old Mickey-D will never know what became of his dear little charity-case!"