"Just name your price, girlie," would inevitably be the message. And here was this Arab rotter grabbing her around the girdle and taking her somewhere west of Suez! And what for? What was the idea? Not till then did it occur to Verbeena that it might be because she was a woman. Naturally, this notion filled her with astonishment and disgust. And rage, touched most lightly with the erotic. 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 Butternut'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 class, 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!"