She got madder and madder!
Indeed, Verbeena became virtuously vibrant with a revolt virginally volcanic. Her eyes shone virescent with hatred and the tiny blue veins on her white forehead under the tawny clubbed curls became varicose.
Besides, she was getting kind of scared.
There was a nifty strangle hold she knew which, could she ever get free of that tail end of his Arabian wrapper, she would love to try out on this rough bird. Her fingers, her small, lithe, delicate, steel-like fingers, tingled at the thought.
Even if her nose was red, she determined to try and poke it out into the air. She would gather new strength and see what the chances were for coming out further. Cautiously she screwed her bobbed head about and finally, poor little snail, managed to thrust her face forward and out of the folds that were stifling her. She opened her mouth wide.
She took in great gulps of air.
Ah, it was good!
But next she took in several deep gulps of sand as it arose from the flying hoofs of her captor"s single footer.
Ah, not so good!
She became aware of a big, glaring face above her. How terribly it frowned!
"Duckmong, Kid, duckmong!" her captor said sternly and pushed her head back as though she was an India rubber doll.
Such was the awful strength of the man!
And then he squeezed her to him till she feared that Bertie b.u.t.ternut"s fate would be her own. She felt crushed to the consistency of malted milk.
Who could he be, this demon? Certainly nothing less than the local Zabysko of Biscuit. And it was marvelous the way he managed at the same time his great, big horse and herself as if she were the smallest pony of a ballet.
She didn"t faint. You"d never catch Verbeena Mayonnaise doing that.
But really she felt an awful lot like it!
He changed her position again. This time he hung her head down.
She looked up into his eyes. (There was no help for it.) The monster laughed at her--laughed!
He was now, she saw, not only driving the horse with one hand and holding her upside down with the other, but had inserted a cigarette into an eighteen-inch amber holder clinched in his teeth.
And then, just to show her his cla.s.s, he bent low until the end of his cigarette touched the tip of her fiery little sunburned nose, lighted the cigarette and all over again he laughed at her.
"You ----, ----!" she cried to him with a rush of words Brother Tawdry himself, could not have excelled.
"By Allah!" he smiled back at her, "what a game little divvle!"
Not being able to get a look at her wrist watch, Verbeena then lost all sense of time. She knew only that the sun was still up and burning her nose ingloriously. But she would resist to the last pulsation of her strong, young heart this desert creature of the strangely, burning pa.s.sionate orbs. They were rather nice eyes but, he would find resistance to the last recalcitrant tissue of her turbulent nature.
He might use her as a cigar lighter.
But just let him try anything else and----
CHAPTER V
The mad, pa.s.sionate ride was over about supper-time.
The next thing Verbeena"s intelligence became immersed in she was standing within a big tent brilliantly lighted by respectable old candles inside of two hanging lamps.
But she didn"t have much chance to look over these things. They hung too high.
What was solely in her mind, to faithfully reproduce its own process accurately was the thought:
"Where"s that sapadillo that brought me here?"
Right in front of her was he standing and she got a good, unfurtive look at him. Sure enough he was as big as he felt when he had her grabbed to him on horseback.
The thing that struck her immediately, stirred her curiously amidst her emotions of hitherto unknown fear and would there be a place in the tent to wash-up properly, was that his hair didn"t match. His whiskers were black, his face was really red, not brown as she saw because he had brushed some of the dust off, whilst his head hair was some kind of color or other.
Just what she couldn"t tell.
It wasn"t red and it wasn"t yellow.
Was it as of the cornflower in ta.s.sel?
She caught her breath. This was no time to become romantic. She was an icicle, she told herself, and must continue to recall that fact.
He was looking at her with burning eyes. No wonder. Her own were burning as savagely as her nose. The sand does it.
But besides he had a curiously mad and giddy gaze.
It was as if he"d caught her in bathing with her clothes on a hickory limb. And wouldn"t have the gentlemanliness, the decency to go away.
She liked it not a little bit and was so nervous she didn"t know whether to throw off her coat and start for him or b.u.t.ton it up. She b.u.t.toned it up. She wondered why. But, of course, it was the way he was looking at her and kept looking at her. She wished she had more b.u.t.tons on her coat. And that her clothing generally was fastened more firmly. His malevolent eyes had such a dismantling expression.
Certainly the burly wretch wasn"t showing any false smoke-stacks.
She could see he meant business.
And such a business!
Verbeena steadied herself on a cigarette.
"Frapjous a.s.s!" she said yet well-knowing that her old boyish nonchalance had gone fazizz. "Who are you?"
"I am----"
Ah, the organ tones of his voice! A little gritty on account of the desert sands perhaps, but deep, thrilling, throbbing. It tickled the very roots of her clubbed curls.
Verbeena vibrated.