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ears that his daughter had become secretly engaged to a
Chinese – and a vaudevillian at that. As a banker and a wealthy
rancher, he could have used his influence to hush the matter up,
but that was not good enough. He had to end the matter – to make
sure nothing came of it, by whatever means came to hand.”
    “Would he actually have killed the girl?”
asked Rozanov the dog-trainer. “It is inconceivable—”
    “Unfortunately,” said Holmes, “it isn’t. And
yes, I believe that after Professor Diggs, and police-captain
O’Day, managed to disperse the first mob that approached the jail
the night of Li’s arrest, Prince’s next step would have been to
have the girl’s body found – in whatever shocking circumstances he
could devise – to make certain that the jail was mobbed, and his
unwanted prospective son-in-law lynched.”
    “It’s why he threw her shoe into the second
cabinet,” said Diana Prince quietly. “That was just like Father –
that showmanship, that melodrama . Yes,” she said, turning to
Rozanov, “he would have killed her, with no more thought about her
being a human being than he had about Julian being a man like
himself. Like me, they were only things that got in his
way.”
     
    *
     
    Holmes, Diggs, and I all testified at
Marshall Prince’s trial for kidnapping, and were duly sued by his
lawyers, not only for slander but for breaking and entering,
charges which were summarily thrown out of the California
courts.
    Prince was convicted, and sentenced to twenty
years’ imprisonment; nevertheless, Julian and Diana Li left San
Francisco and re-settled in the Chinese community in New York, from
which residence they continue to send myself and Holmes small notes
and Christmas greetings each year.
    Holmes’s eventual discovery that Hollis
Connington’s entire persecution had been arranged by the railroad
magnate himself, as a means of purging his family and corporation
of disloyal members, resulted in Holmes leaving his employ a few
days after the Prince trial – and in Connington’s repudiation of
the Palace hotel bill. Fortunately, we had purchased
return-tickets.
    On our return journey across country to take
ship for Liverpool, I had occasion, in Omaha, Nebraska, to look up
Oscar Zoroaster Diggs, and learned – rather disconcertingly – that
the Professor Diggs we had known in San Francisco was something of
an imposter himself. The original OZ Diggs, who had indeed vanished
in a ballooning accident in 1861, had been at that time some
sixty-three years of age, making it impossible for our Professor
Diggs to have been one and the same man, unless of course one
believes that a man stranded for forty years in Fairyland does not
age. Who he really was – and why he had taken on the earlier Great
Oz’s identity – I never learned.
    As for Professor Diggs himself, he vanished
the following year, during another ballooning expedition in Central
California. I have often wondered whether that remarkable little
madman – far saner than the madman Prince whom he had helped Holmes
bring to justice – ever in fact managed to find his way back to his
City of Emeralds.
    I can only hope that he did.

 
     
     
    About the Author
     
     
    Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit