Beyond the Tottenhot village the team enters some rocky mountains, and immediately start seeing warning signs: "LOOK OUT FOR YOOP" and "BEWARE THE CAPTIVE YOOP." Eventually they come to a huge cage carved into a cliff, in which is imprisoned the ferocious giant Mr. Yoop. Yoop is fierce and hungry, and longs to eat up Dorothy and Ojo, but one must take note of his dress sense:
". . . they noticed he was dressed all in pink velvet, with silver buttons and braid. The Giant's boots were of pink leather and had tassels on them and his hat was decorated with an enormous pink ostrich feather, carefully curled."
He's basically Elton John circa 1978, only he's 21 feet tall and hungry for human flesh. The Scarecrow (of course) comes up with a plan to get past the giant cannibal fashionista, and the travelers pass on into the country of the Hoppers and the Horners.
I confess I expected the Hoppers and Horners to be another group of randomly hostile freaks, but I guess Mr. Yoop provided enough danger for this part of the story so instead they turn out to be wacky wayside tribes. Both groups live inside the mountain. The Hoppers are monopods who travel by hopping about (which seems like an invitation to disaster if you live in a low-ceilinged cave system). They are currently at war with the Horners, who are plump little people equipped with six-inch horns in the center of their foreheads. Just like Captain Kirk half a century later, Dorothy brings peace to the warring factions with an earnest chat.
Having accomplished that, the heroes can look for a dark well, and happily the Horners know of one. It's down in the radium mine. What was L. Frank Baum's fascination with radium? Ozma gets a radium crown as a birthday present in The Road to Oz. I guess given how everything in Oz is made of gold and studded with jewels, Baum needed a way to show that something was really rare and valuable.
Since Oz apparently has a good-sized deposit of fissionable material, now I'm thinking about what the Wizard and Glinda would make of it, especially post-1945. (Remember, nobody dies in the fairyland of Oz, so the Wizard will still be around despite having been born circa 1840.) With Glinda's Magic Book and Ozma's Magic Picture to provide the necessary secret intelligence, and with Professor Wogglebug and Tik-Tok to run the project, we can expect Oz to become the first nuclear superpower of Nonestica. That should keep the Nome King in line. It would be particularly entertaining to sprinkle a little of Dr. Pipt's Powder of Life on an Ozian deterrent, so that using it would require a philosophical argument as in John Carpenter's Dark Star.
But I digress. The heroes now have three of the five ingredients, which is good because we're nearly at the end of the book.
After some trouble with a reversing river, Ojo's posse arrives at the magnificent tin castle of the Tin Woodman, Emperor of the Winkies. The Woodman is of course the key to the fourth ingredient, a drop of oil from a living man's body -- he's alive in a somewhat unconventional way, and has to keep himself carefully oiled to prevent rust. Ojo catches a drop from the Woodman's knee, and that leaves only one item left.
Which the Woodman refuses to give them. The Emperor of the Winkies is of course the most tender-hearted man in Oz and absolutely won't permit them to take the left wing of a yellow butterfly (apparently even butterflies in Oz are immortal, since nobody proposes looking for the wing of a dead one). So he and the travelers all go back to the Emerald City to dump the problem in Ozma's lap.
Ozma has been monitoring them the whole time, and has ordered the petrified Unc Nunkie and Margolotte brought to her palace, along with Dr. Pipt. She forbids the Crooked Magician from ever working magic again, and then the Wizard of Oz (using a magic spell helpfully provided by Oz's resident deux ex machina, Glinda) un-petrifies the two poor victims without any butterflies at all. Which means all of Ojo's adventures since leaving the Emerald City were just Ozma jerking her friend Dorothy around some more.
Ojo, Unc Nunkie, Scraps, the Woozy, and the Glass Cat are invited to remain in the Emerald City. Ojo realizes that he isn't unlucky after all, and the story comes to an end rather suddenly.
Ojo becomes a fairly regular recurring character in the later Oz books. I think Mr. Baum must have noticed that the Emerald City was getting crowded with little girls, and wanted to balance things out a bit. Unfortunately, Ojo never really develops much of a personality. He's no Tip, that's for sure. Compared with the determined and assertive Dorothy, or the sweetly autocratic Ozma, Ojo's just kind of there. Once the quest to save Unc Nunkie is over, he even loses his forthright contempt for mere laws and becomes just another brave, good-hearted, but ultimately colorless inhabitant of Oz.
Overall, The Patchwork Girl is what I'd describe as a middleweight Oz book. It's entertaining, we get some nice glimpses of magic, and it introduces a couple of interesting characters who will become regular cast members: Scraps and the Glass Cat. The plot is pretty much boilerplate, though: wander around Oz having random encounters until you get to the end of the book, and an entirely superfluous life lesson is learned. As I said, middleweight.
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