“Do we dare?” Doris leaped to her feet to do a wild fling across the sand. “Dare? Dare?” she cried again. “Who wouldn’t dare?”
As for the native girl, Nieta, she whispered to her snake-tooth charm, then said to Doris with a very sober face, “I am very much afraid, but I will go.”
Never, as long as she lives, will Doris forget that ride back to Cape Haitian. There was a friendly handclasp and a “May you come back” from the king and they were away.
Up, up, up they climbed. The sea swam beneath them. The little island of Manowa drifted away behind them. The great island of Haiti with its plains, its forests, its cloud-capped mountains reached out friendly hands to greet them.
“How wonderful are all the inventions of our age!” Doris thought. “What a marvelous privilege to live in such an age.”
Still, like some great bird their plane soared aloft.
CHAPTER XV
DREAMS
Before they began this thrilling flight Doris and Nieta had told their pilot the exact location of their home in the village of Terre Plaisance. Cape Haitian, his own headquarters, was some twenty miles from their home. This distance they had expected to cover on donkeyback or on foot, as circumstance permitted. Imagine their surprise when, as they watched the ever changing panorama that passed beneath them, they began recognizing little hill peaks and dark groves that formed the surroundings of their own little village and not Cape Haitian at all.
“Surely,” Doris said to herself, with a little intake of breath, “he would not attempt to land in our garden, or the village street. That would be impossible.”
As for Nieta she was busy whispering to her snake-tooth charm, for she expected nothing else than that they would go crashing into some rocky hillside or plunging into the forest.