"I'm getting my magic ready to transport them all."
"Shag-gy's broth-er is a good fel-low, and we can't spare Shag-gy."
"So, then, the question is settled," decided Ozma. "Perform your magic, Wizard!"
He did so, placing a silver plate upon a small standard and pouring upon the plate a small quantity of pink powder which was contained in a crystal vial. Then he muttered a rather difficult incantation which the sorceress Glinda the Good had taught him, and it all ended in a puff of perfumed smoke from the silver plate. This smoke was so pungent that it made both Ozma and Dorothy rub their eyes for a moment.
"You must pardon these disagreeable fumes," said the Wizard. "I assure you the smoke is a very necessary part of my wizardry."
"Look!" cried Dorothy, pointing to the Magic Picture; "they're gone! All of them are gone."
Indeed, the picture now showed the same rocky landscape as before, but the three people and the mule had disappeared from it.
"They are gone," said the Wizard, polishing the silver plate and wrapping it in a fine cloth, "because they are here."
At that moment Jellia Jamb entered the room.
"Your Highness," she said to Ozma, "the Shaggy Man and another man are in the waiting room and ask to pay their respects to you. Shaggy is crying like a baby, but he says they are tears of joy."
"Send them here at once, Jellia!" commanded Ozma.
"Also," continued the maid, "a girl and a small-sized mule have mysteriously arrived, but they don't seem to know where they are or how they came here. Shall I send them here, too?"
"Oh, no!" exclaimed Dorothy, eagerly jumping up from her chair; "I'll go to meet Betsy myself, for she'll feel awful strange in this big palace."
And she ran down the stairs two at a time to greet her new friend, Betsy Bobbin.
"Well, is 'hee-haw' all you are able to say?" inquired the Sawhorse, as he examined Hank with his knot eyes and slowly wagged the branch that served him for a tail.
They were in a beautiful stable in the rear of Ozma's palace, where the wooden Sawhorse--very much alive--lived in a gold-paneled stall, and where there were rooms for the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, which were filled with soft cushions for them to lie upon and golden troughs for them to eat from.