The mad, passionate 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 tassel?

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 button it up. She buttoned 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 buttons 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 ass!” 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.

“I am the Sheik Amut Ben Butler!”

The name conveyed nothing to her.

She had never heard of Ben Butler.

He turned the full force of his fifty-two candle power passionut glance upon her.

“The notion of this game is,” he said in his deep, devilish voice, “‘Give and Take.’ You give or I take!”

Verbeena immediately gave a shriek!

And she’d never done anything like that before in her life!

“Did you hear that?” she demanded tensely.

“And that!” and shrieked again.

“That’s what you look like to me! A Shriek, Amut Ben Butler—it’s what you are too! And a pretty loud and silly one!

“You let me right out of here! When my big brother hears of this, he’ll be out this way and kick the fol de rols out of you! That’s what’ll happen. The nerve of you with your banana-skinned face and black licorice whiskers! Stand back, miscreant, I would pass!”

“May Allah bust eggs on my turban!” hissed the Sheik Amut Ben Butler, “but this is a saucy baggage!”

With that he threw off his magnificent, flowing white cloak and he hopped her.

He had her in a mad, palpitant chancery but Verbeena put up some great infighting. She gave it to him good—right and left into the kish-kish (ringside and Yiddish for breadbasket) and now and again sought the point of the chin with a left uppercut that had hitherto always served her well. It had beautifully in that fight with the policeman.

But in all the many other bouts in which Verbeena had been engaged, kissing was strictly foul. It was sometimes permitted at the ringsides, she had observed, at the end of a fight, but never in the mix-ups.

Unsportsmanlike brute!

For as she let go a wild, desperate uppercut it shot harmlessly past an adroitly lowered chin and the next instant he had smacked her full upon the mouth.

A terrific, scorching smack!

It knocked Verbeena wuffy.

She could almost hear a referee, a misty, intangible wraith-like referee, giving her the full count, for the hot mouth pressed against hers was superlatively soporific, nicotinically, garliciously narcotic.

“First fall!” grinned the Sheik Amut Ben Butler the while he chucked the giddy girl through some heavy curtains upon a stack of soft yellow, pink, red (dark and light) gold, silver green and mauve cushions.

Yet Verbeena, remember, had verve!

Besides, she well knew the ha-ha the world ever handed a fallen champ or lady who claimed to have been drugged.

Realizing she was up against a losing fight, yet she arose for more trouble. Yep, up she came defiant if saggy. Nobody had ever put her in such a bait before! She would go on with it—on—on—on with it!

She’d get him yet!

Yet only too well she knew that one more fragrant kiss like that which she had just put over and she must go whiff-whaff.

It had been a soul-numbing smack. And she felt her knees knockier than she ever had known them.

Also she seemed to have had just then a glimpse of her moral stamina and the vision was as of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a high wind.

Her face ached, her left ear ached and more awfully than either her peculiar temperament ached.

Her face showed pain in every lineament.

“I ask you,” said the Sheik Amut in his slow, awful drawl, twirling the tassel of his magenta sash, “what’s the idea of kicking up all this shindy? Aw—take off your necktie! Do you expect me to be your valet as well as lover?”

“You——” she began in crashing opposition to any tomfoolery of a dark, questionable nature.

“Spaghetti!” snapped the Sheik.

She observed that he looked over her shoulder. She turned. She saw then a little fat man behind her just as he was answering reverently:

“Aye—aye, Monseigneur!”

“The——,” the Sheik nodded fiercely at the little man.

She hadn’t a chance. She knew it.

She saw the arm of Spaghetti only as it was descending. The hand held a canvas jacket of the size and shapely proportions of a corpulent bologna. And it was stuffed with Sahara.

“See here!” cried Verbeena. “This is rotten. It’s not cricket. I——”

“Not cricket perhaps, but quite clubby,” said Amut Ben Butler with his brutal smile.

The blow fell.

Verbeena vertigoed.