“It’s out of a Story Book,” Mary Whispered
But Mary could not forget. She thought of many things, the bag, the boy beachcomber she had left behind in South America, of the fine boys of the desert and Ramsey who had guarded her so well, and of the vanishing papyrus. “What of tomorrow?” she asked herself.
With one ear she was catching threads of a conversation.
“Yes, he is short and rather fat,” her father was saying, “rather pompous, a Dutchman or perhaps a German.”
“Yes, I think I know him,” was their host’s reply. “He says he is from Holland. He trades in cheap pottery and sometimes in toys. I think he is German. We shall catch up with that man, you and I.”
She knew they were speaking of the man who had taken her bag.
They were to “catch up with that man” sooner than she thought, not her father and their host, but her father and herself.
Night was falling as they rode back into the village. They were passing along a street lined on one side by low homes and on the other by a hill that sloped away from them, when they caught up with a vaguely familiar figure.
“It can’t be that I know him,” the girl thought. “He is wearing a long, Persian robe. I am acquainted with no Persians.”