“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!”

CHAPTER III

When the last floating ends of Lord Tawdry’s face-banners had disappeared over the horizon, Musty Ale made bold to appear before Verbeena, who with eyes crossed was dipping deeply into a highball of Scotch which tended to denature the Sahara.

“Mademoiselle, it is time that we left, by Allah,” he said.

“It isn’t by my watch,” she replied, frowning. “Also, Musty, I am no longer to be called mademoiselle. After this mention me as Queen.”

“Sultana?”

“I don’t like that fruit-cracker word either, my good man. Queen! And don’t forget it. And don’t look cross at me in your mysterious Oriental way. You might as well get used to it. Perhaps I’m not a queen yet but,” as she filled her three slim gold cigarette cases, “I soon will be. Queen. Understand?”

“%—&&&&&*% *(*)#**’’*# —— —-!!!!.” muttered Musty in his native tongue. (A darned barefaced queen in britches! May the Prophet part me from my whiskers!)”

“What, sirrah?”

“Allah witness, I said nothing.”

“Keep right on doing that,” said Verbeena.

Her words came in a tone