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“I tell you, Terry! Let’s find a drinking trough and wash ourselves as well as we can, and then perhapssome taxi driver will take us and wait for his fare. ”

Terry looked at him with hurt astonishment. “Clean up? And lose all that publicity, when they’ll be taking our photographs? Why, Mixy!”

“What’s publicity?” asked Max humbly.

Discouraged by such ignorance, too tired to explain the metaphysical doctrine, Terry merely grunted, “Come on, we’ll start for Fleet Street. ”

A dozen times they stopped to rest. Once they bathed their feet in a fountain. But at nine that evening, they climbed the stairs to the office of the London bureau of the New York Venture.

They found a reception room littered with newspapers and with an office boy who snapped, “Now getalong!”

But Terry now was Terry Tait again. “Get along, rats! I want to see the boss!” he clamored.

“What’s all this?” from an inner door, where stood a sleepy young man in shirt sleeves. His voice was American.

“I’m Terry Tait. This is the King of Slovaria. ”

The sleepy young man came awake with vigor. He seized Terry’s shoulder; peered at him; glanced at Max.

“And I believe you are!” he shouted. “Have you been back to the Picardie?”

“No. We’re too dirty. We came here first. We ran away to be pirates, and a man robbed us in Bermondsey of all our money, and we been wandering around there all day, and we came here because my father always reads the Venture and—we’re hungry!”

“Wait! For heaven’s sake!” The man threw a ten-shilling note at the gaping office boy. “Beat it! Get some food! Beans! Ice cream! Champagne! Anything! But make it snappy! Come in here, you kids—I mean, Your Majesty, and you, Terry. ” He hustled them into his office, threw two chairs in their general direction, and was bellowing into the telephone receiver the number of the central cable office.

Three minutes later a wild telegraph operator slapped on the desk of the news editor of the Venture, in New York, a dispatch reading:

FLASH TAIT KING SLOVARIA GIVE SELVES UP LONDON BUREAU VENTURE RUNAWAY BE PIRATES BULLETIN IMMEDIATELY

And sixteen minutes after that newsboys were racing out of the Venture building bellowing, “Terry Tait and King found! Terry and King found!”

And half an hour after that, the complete story, with “exclusive interviews” with Terry Tait and H. R. M. the King of Slovaria, was being eagerly read, in various tongues, by excited journalists in Rutland and Raleigh, Barcelona and Budapest, Manila and Madrid.

But the most famous two boys in the world, and the most famous dog, almost, in history, were quietly and unctuously eating ham and cold chicken and sally lunns, while a wide-awake young man called the Picardie and desired to speak to the suite of the Queen of Slovaria.

In the boudoir of Her Majesty, the Queen of Slovaria, was a scene at once impressive enough for the movies and humble enough for— well, humble enough for the movies.

On Her Majesty’s lap sat an American small boy, recently and drastically scrubbed, clad in pajamas and a dressing gown, beatifically eating a most unhygienic and delightful cream roll. Beside them, beaming up at this Madonna scene, was another small boy, also scrubbed, also in dressing gown, also cramming into his mouth the luscious gooey cream. He was petting a woolly dog—a pure-bred Margate Wader—whose tongue lolled out with idiotic contentment.

Facing them was Bessie, smiling over her cigarette. And rushing around faithfully doing nothing in particular was a young Englishman, name of Bundock, who was to be Max’s valet in two or three years, after he had been properly trained in the household of Sidonie’s dear friend, the Duchess of Twickenham.

Now begins, after the pleasant homeliness, the impressiveness. The duchess began it. She was staring at the family scene; she was tall and gray; she wore rusty black; and within her powerful brain she was obviously meditating, “This is what comes of treating Slovarians and Americans and all suchlike colonials, no matter how highly placed, as though they were gentry!”

The second touch of impressiveness was given by Prince Sebenco, Prime Minister of Slovaria.

He was a tall man with a black beard. He was protesting, “But, ma’am, I quite appreciate that it would be an honor for us to entertain Madame Tait and her charming son, but your people, ma’am; they were highly agitated by His Majesty’s disappearance, and I fear they would resent your bringing His Majesty’s associate in this idiot—I mean, in this adventure. How alarmed I was you may deduce from my having taken an airplane. Eeee! A nasty device! I was very sick!”