“Of course,” Lucile said with a long face as the three of them discussed the matter, “she says it’s a very nice apartment but it can’t be half as nice as—”
“As the O Moo,” Florence put in. “Of course not. Nothing ever can be.”
“Oh, well,” Marian sighed, “I guess we’ll have to do it. But I do think the old O Moo is a dear. I shouldn’t like anything better than rambling through a whole summer with her almost anywhere on the Great Lakes.”
Since this was to be their last night they determined to make the most of it. They had Mark Pence in for hot chocolate and vanilla wafers. They told him of their adventures and he spoke modestly of his own.
“So you see,” he said, going back to the very beginning of the story as he now knew it, “when these Negontisks found out they were going to be deported they hunted out an unscrupulous Chinaman who transformed them into people of his own race. That wasn’t hard. They were Orientals anyway. All he had to do was to provide them with black sateen suits and artificial pigtails and the transformation was complete.
“Then the Chinaman saw a chance to make a lot of easy money. He put them to work in his laundry—virtually made slaves of them. Fixed up that old scow for them secretly and made them sneak back and forth to work during the night.
“That lasted for a time, then the greedy old Chinaman suddenly disappeared. Negontisks sacrificed him to the blue god, like as not. Served him right too.
“But that was where the police took up the trail. The savages knew there was trouble coming. They thought you were a plant—that you were set here to spy on them. They’d been betrayed by some woman before, it seems. When they couldn’t get rid of you by frightening you, they decided to cut you loose in a storm.”
“And now—” began Florence.
“Now they’ve vanished. Not a trace of them has been seen since that night.”