The promised send-off of Verbeena from the Biscuit Hotel had been
enthusiastic.
"Very much so," had said Lady Speedway, the mean thing.
At dawn Musty Ale sent ahead the procession of baggage bearers, the
lumbering camels, all of them Verbeena thought showing great facial
resemblance to Lady Speedway and hoped some day to tell her so.
But otherwise she just adored them.
"See," said she to Lord Tawdry who had surprised her by getting up,
"the darling camels how they chew and chew and chew and are never
satisfied!"
At dawn also on many of the private balconies of the Biscuit Hotel
were seen veiled faces. They were veiled by lattices and lace
curtains--each with one eye out.
It was the espionage of the Knitting Needle Hussars.
"There she goes, the bold minx," murmured Mrs. the Honorable General
the Earl Dumpydale.
"She means to do it--to cross the desert alone! O, shameless!" openly
cried the Duchess Pyllboxe-Beauchamp.
"She'd better keep her fingers crossed at the same time!"
This from that old Lady Speedway, of course.
"Ah," murmured in the next balcony the Hon. Maude Tetherington, a cute
spinster of sixty who would remember you in her will if you told her
she didn't look it, "Ah!" and it was as if she were murmuring to
herself.
"Once I dreamed of riding in the desert and of a great, handsome Arab
pursuing me and----" it was, as stated, as if she were speaking to
herself but you bet Lady Speedway got it.
"And what?" Lady Speedway demanded with a cold look in her eye.
"There was no offense to the proprieties," said the Hon. Maude with
trembling accents. "I assure you I woke up in time."
The Hon. Maude drew her head within and snapped the lattices of her
window shut.
But a little later as she stood at her mirror tacking on her front
curls she paused, hammer in hand, to stare back in the direction she
had last seen Lady Speedway.
"But there have been times when I have greatly wished I hadn't--so
there!"
And she stuck out her tongue, nor', nor'west due east toward Speedway.
* * * * *
Thus amid a magnificent display of good-wishes, Verbeena Mayonnaise
set out to satisfy her soul longings upon the somewhat dusty Sahara,
under the capable guidance of Musty Ale and his equally musty camels
and his mustard colored men.
Lord Tawdry had stood in his balcony shaking his finger at Verbeena
and declaring if she dared set out he would be down directly and cane
her severely, but she answered pertly:
"Rot, old chap!"
As Verbeena rode ahead with Musty Ale, Lord Tawdry started in pursuit
on a camel which, however, refused to hump itself worthily, and
although Lord Tawdry kept crying out to Verbeena: "O, I say now--it
won't do! Do you hear me? Really this sort of thing simply isn't
done!" it was not until Musty Ale's caravan arrived at Oasis No. 1
that Lord Tawdry was able to catch up.
But as soon as he had fallen off his camel and readjusted his monocle,
he picked up a riding whip and chased Verbeena up a palm tree.
"You sickening ass!" our laddiebuck--I mean heroine called to him,
"you just drop that whip and I'll come down and show you who's who in
Sahara!"
Action wasn't Lord Tawdry's strong point anyway except with a good
deck of cards.
"Verbeena," he said, "come down peacefully and we'll have it out in
talk."
"O, you Hergesheimer!" smiled she, leaping to the ground, lighting a
cigarette in her descent.
"Now look here, Tawdry, what's the idea of your trailing me this way?
My mind's made up. You'll have simply missed a whole day at bridge and
you know you can't afford it. I'm going to put in a month--a full
month on the Sahara. I've the sand so why shouldn't I?"
Verbeena drew herself up and shot a cigarette snag squarely into a
lizard's eye. Pardon--I forgot to mention the lizard was twisting in
the brilliant sunshine on a nearby opalescent rock.
"Kid," said Lord Tawdry, not unkindly, "cut the proud boyish beauty
stuff for half a shake, if you please. One must get down to brass
tacks once in a while and just now the situation is such that I feel
as if I were sitting on the points of a million."
"Talk reasonably," said Miss Mayonnaise almost effeminately, "and I
will do what little I can to understand you."
"Well then, why this sudden interruption in our plans? The idea was
that I was to chuck myself to America and go to Newport or some other
nearby spot like Los Angeles and pluck for myself a wife somewhere
between twenty to forty in age and forty to sixty in millions of
American--er--buckoes--I think the bounders call 'em."
"And I," nodded Verbeena, "was to go along and subtly instruct the
victim that it wasn't necessary in good society to perform so many
fancy tricks as Americans do with their forks and that in acquiring an
English accent one didn't say fawncy for fancy. And I was to tell her
how sensitive you were about money--about ever being left without
any."
"Bright chap, you are, Verbeena! It was a jolly plan. But when
Butternut and his five thousand pun' a year came along I was willing
to sacrifice myself, was I not?
"I was willing," said Lord Tawdry, "to postpone America and stick to
bridge until you'd a chance to snap the bally, wedding manacles on the
pretty youth. And everything seemed moving perfectly until late last
night. His eyes were then shining like a pair of motor car lamps with
love for you.
"I saw him beg you to go out upon the balcony.
"And next a scream!
"Butternut is carried in on a stretcher and you stroll back looking
like an incense burner.
"I seek to see Butternut. I cannot. I seek explanation from you----"
"If only you hadn't begun with that usual stuff of clubbing my curls,
Tawdry!--I just made up my mind to let you remain in suspense a while.
But now I'll tell all!
"I tried to play fair, Tawdry, tried to play fair," said Verbeena
earnestly, "like the square little fellow I am."
"Did Butternut ask you to marry him out there on the balcony last
night?"
"He did."
"Well then?"
"Tawdry, old chap, I overplayed my hand. I threw myself into his arms
cooing 'Bertie, dearest Bertie' in as ladylike a manner as my bringing
up allows. And then he hugged me. And to show him I really loved him,
don't you know, I hugged him back. I just let myself go, old dear!"
"To be sure--quite right--under the circumstances."
"Stupid! I broke three of his ribs."
"My Gawd!"
"Not so amazing after all," said Verbeena with a glint of boyish
pride.
"And he--since--he----?"
"At three-thirty one and a half by my wrist watch--the only piece of
jewelry, by the way, you've left me--I received, Lord Tawdry, this
communication from the hospital cot of the Honorable Bertram
Butternut!"
Out of the hip pocket of her smart riding breeches, Verbeena flashed a
paper on her brother.
[Illustration: THE HONORABLE BERTIE BUTTERNUT, WHOSE PASSION WAS
CRUSHED WITH HIS RIBS.]
As he read it, he clutched wildly at his long black mustaches for
support.
"'Dear old Verb,' the Hon. Bertie had written, 'I think you
will be too much of a good fellow to hold me to my rash words
of last night.
"'The mater and I talked it over at my bedside while the
plastercasts were being fashioned.
"'Though the tears blot this letter yet through their splashes,
I cannot but see that mamma's advice is good. Better, the mater
says, a broken heart than a succession of fractured ribs!
"'And myself looking into the future I cannot bear to think of
my children beholding a father who is nothing but a cracked and
shattered pulp.
"'Mother begs you to be generous and says she is more than
willing to be generous in her turn, desiring me to say she will
be most glad amply to finance your contemplated trip into the
desert. And even beyond.
"'I hope, dear, we may ever remain pals. After all it will be
nicer when we meet--will it not--just to shake hands?
"'Brokenly,
"'BERTIE.'"
"O, but I say, you know," said Lord Tawdry, "this could be patched
up."
"Only Bertie."
"Rot. You could hold him."
"Not if he saw me coming. The boy is the best sprinter at Oxford.
Anyway----"
Verbeena regarded her brother through the sweeping black lashes of her
impenetrably palpable orbs, considering carefully that the
fulminations between them had reached a clangorous climax of the
neurotically nepotic.
This was, indeed, the sort of look she gave him and she was a long
while at it.
He tried to stare back at her with the intolerability of the inhumanly
inoculated. But he found it fundamentally difficult and dropped his
eye-glass fifty-four times in the course of the construction of this
cryptic attitude.
Verbeena laughed. She would put the skids under him. It was time--high
time. Had he not already set his face, such as it was, against the
aspirations of her innermost urge? Hadn't he, because of ignorance of
the illuminative interior expansiveness of her reason for desiring to
hit forth into the Sahara sided with Old Hen Speedway and that whole
crew of clacking character assassins and killjoys?
And after himself training her to be a roughneck too?
Now he would seek to discourage her thrilling _tour de hopoff_ into
the Sahara!
Without knowing her very good reason for wanting to do it!
Pretending concern in her, had he not really joined the camp of her
enemies and detractors, the _volte face_ thing!
Of course, if the Ole Walrus knew! If she were to confide the ultimate
purpose of her crystal soul and stalactitic heart to him, spill the
beans of what was on her mind--it would be different. He'd cling to
her very stirrup and hop along clamoring for his piece of the
pickings.
But she could see he was passé, declassé, a prune pit in every way.
The perfumed gold mines of Newport and Palm Beach were his best
berry-picking grounds.
To take him with her--impossible! It would not only confuse the issue
but crab the act. Absolutely. She knew that in the romantic but in
conclusion pre-eminently profitable rumble she had in mind, Lord
Tawdry could only prove a hang-nail, that is to say a detriment to the
scheme.
She saw him readjust his monocle twelve times and yawn six and knew he
was going to say something. Not much--he never did. But----
"Blast it, Verbeena, you little rotter, what the deuce I say, you
know, is all this bally, bloomin', sand-eatin' desert journey about
anyway? I say, my dear chappie, what _is_ the idea?"
"None of your damned biznai, old thing. And there you have it."
"But I should really so like to know."
"Tosh!"
"But all the Mollie Jawags back at the Biscuit will jazz me awf'ly
about permitting you to tack off alone this way with----" Lord Tawdry
waved his hand toward Musty Ale and his turbaned crew.
"As if it would really worry you," said Miss Mayonnaise with a very
unboyish giggle.
"It doesn't, I confess, since Bertie Butternut's mother is financing
you. And yet--no, I can't allow it. I couldn't face it. I couldn't
lift me head if anything--er--anything, let us say, Oriental
happened."
"Well, you are seldom able to lift your head after ten in the morning
anyway," said Verbeena. "Let us waste no more time, my beloved
brother. Get into mental condition with yourself quickly and know that
for the next month a kid of the desert am I. Ain't I twenty-one now?
Got a vote that's just as good as yours at 'ome, and a punch that I
think is better.
"Nothing stops me--Tawd, nothing, old top. So take a spin for yourself
back to the Biscuit. And whatever thinking you do you can start all
over again from there."
Verbeena paused, astonished at herself.
She hadn't lighted a cigarette for forty seconds!
She got one going immediately and as she puffed voraciously at her fag
watched with keen pleasure the furrows gather on her brother's small
patch of sun-kissed brow.
Within two minutes, quite suddenly for him, Lord Tawdry drew a
revolver.
"Not to--to hint nothin', Verbie," he said "but you are to come back
to the hotel with me directly. Directly, do you hear?"
He looked at her impressively and shot at a camel. He hit a palm tree.
"I say you know!" he said and stared at his weapon stupidly. "I
never----"
He shot again. This time at the palm tree. But the camel neatly
ducked.
Verbeena smiled and started another cigarette. She went over to the
camel, rubbed its clever nose, brought out her gold-lined case and fed
the camel a ciggy too.
Then she turned toward her brother--turned with boyish abandon and
hauteur, of course--and spoke. Speaking she said:
"That will be about all from you, Tawd. Pack your gat."
Montrose, her brother's valet, an unexpectedly, entirely unusual
perfect servant, came along the Sahara bearing two plates of soup. It
was the appointed dining hour for Lord Tawdry. Regardless of what he
might do as to debts, he insisted on prompt feeding.
"Drop that soup," said Verbeena sternly. "Your master isn't staying to
dinner and the soup will not stain the sand.
"Instead, Montrose," continued Verbeena, "get out the fine comb, for
this day finds your master with more sand than soup in his hanging
gardens.
"Afterwards tie his shoes and put on his sunbonnet for Lord Tawdry is
going day-day."
"Yes, miss, thank you, miss."
"Back to the Biscuit, you understand, Montrose."
"Yes, miss; thank God, miss."
"Verbeena!"
Again Lord Tawdry clutched his pistol.
"Aw-blooey," said Verbeena. "As long as you aim it at men I don't in
the least mind. To horse, Lord Tawdry! This is my camp and you just
keep out of it, do you hear?"
As her brother rode dejectedly away, his long, black mustaches of
Spanish moss effect mingling with the turf on his charger's
ginger-colored hump, Verbeena lit a bunch of cigarettes in his honor
and let go a devilish wink at Musty Ale.
Musty's palms went up toward the heavens.
"O, Allah, witness," he chanted, his chin also pointing at the azure
African sky, "be she, he or it--SOME kid!"